Spoken like a true vampire.
“And don’t get mad at me. It’s not like I know anything about you.”
“You know plenty about me,” I said, running my hands along the ground and feeling for pebbles.
She returned my shoulder bump.
“No, I don’t. I know what restaurants you like, what type of person you like to feed on, your favorite bars, what you like to read, but I don’t know anything of substance about you. You’ve never told me about your transformation.”
“Because I don’t like to think about it,” I said before I could filter my words.
“No vampire does. That’s why we’ve been friends for the better part of a century and I just told you about mine. We’re lucky to even have each other. Not many immortals really have friends.”
She was right, and it was sad.
I found a pebble I liked, nice and smooth and round, and tossed it out in front of me while Lola did the same. I wondered what Matt was doing.
I got up, leaving Lola in place, and walked over to the tree. Matt was in a hefty branch about halfway up, picking at leaves and looking out over the water.
“Hey,” I said as I jumped up to grab a branch a few feet below him.
I swung my body to get a foothold on another branch, and in a second or two was right below Matt on a branch of my own. Even though I didn’t have a physical gift, I still had the strength and agility of a vampire, and I remembered that it was fun.
“Hey,” he said and smiled at me in a way that gave me a pulling sensation in my belly.
“Whatcha doing?”
“Nothing.”
He shook his head while he said this, his hair moving along with his head, and picked another leaf from the tree, which he began to shred in his hands.
“You look peaceful,” I said, simply saying what was on my mind. I had been doing that more and more recently, which for a seducer was downright odd. But then again, I wasn’t one anymore.
“I am peaceful,” he said, looking down at me. “I’ve always liked being outside, and with my new gifts, it’s even more fun.”
“Yeah?” I said and smiled back at him.
I was struck by how ungrateful I was. For as many times as I’d been out here, it was mostly to brood.
“Yeah,” he said and looked surprised. “I mean, don’t you feel the same way? Feels good to run and to jump and climb up a tree. And as a vampire, it’s doubly fun.”
I just smiled back up at him again.
I started to think about what he just said, leaving him to his leaf picking and stream viewing, and then I felt the urge to voice my thoughts.
“I think I started to get tired of all this stuff a couple of decades in,” I said and looked up at him.
He turned his head down, and my night vision caught his blue eyes perfectly. They sparkled back at me, as if he had all of the stars captured in them, and then he held out a hand toward me.
I grabbed it and got to my feet, and then Matt pulled me up the rest of the way, setting me on his lap.
It was sheer vampire ability that he was able to sit on a branch with his legs outstretched, leaning back against the trunk, while balancing my body on top of his. Now I was grateful.
He wrapped both arms around me tightly and kissed the side of my neck. Then he used his teeth a little to fake-bite me. I appreciated the irony.
“So you’re just completely bored of being one of the most powerful beings in the universe?” he asked, partially teasing and, I sensed, partially serious.
I thought about it, about how ridiculous it sounded, and answered him.
“Yeah.”
I didn’t know what else to say after that, though I felt like he was waiting for an explanation.
“So are you just really hard to please or is it something else?”
“Probably both,” I said and laughed.
I waited for him to ask another question, but he never did.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, it’s fun. Everything you can do. Everything you have. But...it’s like living in a golden fortress with everything you could ever want. Money, food, sex, power. Over and over and over again. But you can’t leave the fortress.”
I unwrapped his arms and turned my body around on top of him so we were facing each other. He put a hand on each of my thighs, grasping lightly, to hold me there, though I would have been fine on my own.
“I want to leave the fortress. I want to go outside. Even if that means the money and the food and the sex and the power have to stay inside. I want to know what’s out there.”
I knew how insane this sounded to a vampire so young, who had just begun to flex his muscles, so to speak. But after a while, it was all the same. It blurred together, just like the decades, like the centuries, and there was no enjoyment. No peace. Not even thrill. Not after a while.
Not even my favorite cocktail of seduction, sex and killing would fill me up after a while. And I was only three hundred years old. Where would I be at five hundred? At a thousand? It hurt me to think of it. If I was bored now, I’d be comatose then. At least in my mind, in my spirit. What I wanted was my flesh. My flesh that could become diseased or injured or dysfunctional. My flesh that could decay and rot. My flesh that could be buried or burned and simply become ash. Become a part of the world that it once was. But as it stood now, my flesh could never be a part of the earth again. I was outside of it. In a loophole between life and death, as the left-hand female of The Three had told me. I was outside of life, though it was the thing I had the most of.
“That sounds like the most basic of human emotions to me,” Matt said, and it felt like hours had passed since I had last spoken.
I blinked a couple of times and took in a breath, trying to orient myself back to my environment.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“To want what you can’t have.”
When I smiled back at him, there was no mirth in it. Only sadness, truth and despair. He was right.
“But I’m not human,” I said, and as I said it, it seemed to sear itself in my brain. Set it in stone. I had to accept it.
“Maybe you’re more human than you realize,” Matt said, and as he said it, I caught his eyes and felt pulled into a vortex that was outside of time.
I could feel his body, but he was lost to me as I was to myself. When I traveled back out and could see his eyes and his face again, I knew it.
That was my desire.
4
“Matt, that’s it,” I said, but before he could respond I jumped down from the tree and ran over to Lola.
“I’ve got it,” I said, and I must have looked excited because Lola jumped up from the ground and came toward me.
“What?” she asked.
“My desire. Like The Three said.”
She stopped and waited for me to go on. I suddenly felt self-conscious, like she was waiting for me to say something profound, and instead I felt like I was telling her the most obvious thing in the world.
“I want to be human,” I said, and I swore the forest stopped moving.
Everything went silent for a second. The insects and animals stopped buzzing and chirping and moving around in the grass. The water in the stream froze, and even the clouds and the stars and the atmosphere stopped wherever it was for just a moment.
I saw despair in Lola’s eyes and something else I couldn’t pick out right away.
“But that’s impossible.”
In my mind I knew she was right. But in my gut I was sure of it. I had never before felt so certain. Not while hunting, not while seducing. Not even while draining someone’s body of all their blood. This was it.
But she was right. It was impossible.
“That can’t be it,” she said and grabbed both of my upper arms as she did so. Her eyes were like churning rivers of dark brown, dangerous but seductive, and I felt like I could see our seventy-five-year friendship all in one instant. It wasn’t a coincidence. We had been led to one another.
Lola still had me by the arms, but at the sound of his voice, I wriggled out of her grasp.
“To be human. That’s my desire,” I said, turning toward Matt.
“There is no way to become human again,” Lola said, persisting, the strain in her voice evident. “Becoming a vampire is a one-way street. There’s no turning around. Don’t you think someone else would have figured it out by now if it could be done.”
Yeah, I did think that. But I also knew what I felt.
This wasn’t the same type of desire as the desire to feed, or to have sex, or to read or to eat. Those were all fine things, but they were on the surface. This was something rising up in me from someplace deep below.
Like the cavern I had transported myself to in my imagination. It came from there, wherever there was.
It was the truth and I knew it.
“I know it sounds crazy,” I said to Lola. “But I’m sure. I’m sure this is it.”
She just shook her head.
“It can’t be.”
“It is,” I said and smiled.
5
Despite the lack of support, I was flying high.
Something had returned to me. Had filled in all the empty spaces in my body and energized me with something I had never had.
Purpose.
I was supposed to figure out how to become human again.
Lola was putting up with me, as any vampire of any experience would do. Matt was slightly more supportive, though even he knew that according to popular belief, it couldn’t be done.
But what I knew—and I felt like I was starting to get the hang of knowing—was that what I felt was real. And if it was real, it led somewhere.
Raven had put me in the right place to receive the insight, and Matt and Lola had helped me figure it out in their own ways. It all added up. Every event. Every meeting. It was all a part of the same thing.
It was the order at work.
And now I knew it.
I went about my daily life as I had always done, knowing that something would eventually pop up to lead me.
Lola persisted in trying to get me to think about it some more, even suggesting we go back to Raven’s. But I knew we didn’t need Raven anymore. She had done her job, and now it was time for me to do mine.
I decided to go hunting instead.
Matt and Lola weren’t hungry, so I went on my own, which was perfectly fine with me. At least for now.
I set out that night around midnight and headed for my favorite bar. The one where I had met Matt.
My hunger was a six on a scale of ten. Just high enough that I was feeling it, but low enough that I didn’t feel desperate. I wanted to be fully present tonight.
I walked along the dark streets, a lone female in clothes that showed off my best assets. If I hadn’t been a vampire, this would have been downright dangerous, but I wasn’t worried about any human male that might want to assault me. He’d be dead before he knew it.
I was starting to realize that my night vision was actually getting clearer and more brilliant. This wasn’t just a one- or two-time thing. Now, in the dark, I felt like I could see into the very essence of the environment around me. Past the individual molecules that made up any material and into their life force.
And, you know, I never realized this before, but even brick or concrete or asphalt had life to it. Sure, it was a different kind of life than a person, an animal, or even a plant had. But each object glowed with its own force, and I loved it.
It was like watching a movie with the most brilliant color, but in which all the gaps were filled in with shadow rather than light. So everything was outlined in shadow, but maintained its own essence, more brilliant and magnificent than in the day time. It was the contrast, I think, that made it seem that way.
I would glance at an old, dirty brick building and the bricks seemed to pulsate as I walked by. I swore I could see each pore, each imperfection in the material, and I knew that each and every one of those bricks had been placed in exactly the way they were meant to be. I knew things were right.
I turned a corner, almost to the party street, and as I did so I was lifted a few feet in the air by a strong force and slammed up against a wall.
There was a woman in front of me, obviously immortal, her hand around my neck, closing off my throat to incoming air.
I wanted to tell her to go fuck off because I knew she wanted my hunting territory, but there was no way I could get any words out.
She was strong, to the point I realized this must be her gift, and although she couldn’t kill me, she could make my night very unpleasant.
“Stay away,” she said, and something in her voice made me think she was a new vampire, maybe even testing out her newfound talents on me. She laughed and lowered me to the ground, and my hands instinctively went to my throat as I sucked in a gulp of air and got my voice back.
“Fuck you,” I said, but before I could get another sentence out, she picked me up and hurled me up against the adjacent wall, my body hitting those beautiful, pulsating bricks and breaking in dozens of places.
I heard and felt bone break and I cried out from the intensity of the pain. It would heal eventually, but with injuries this bad I knew it would take most of the night, and it would not be fun.
I heard her footsteps pick up as she walked away from me, not saying anything else. She was sending me a message. Whether it was her own message or someone else’s was unclear to me at the moment.
I couldn’t lie here all night healing. I needed to get back to my apartment. My phone was in my bag and I knew just finding it and holding it in my hand would be an ordeal, but I had to get to Lola.
My breathing was labored and in addition to the pain of broken bones and internal bleeding, a stinging sensation was spreading throughout my body. I knew it was my healing response, but it didn’t make me feel any better
I was on my left side, facing the wall and, for what it was worth, my bag was in front of me and within reach. I went into that place again, the cavern inside me, and gathered all the strength I could muster. Then I moved my right hand into the opening of my bag and gritted my teeth.
Bone rubbed against bone, and I felt like I was going to pass out, but I couldn’t do that. Not yet. If someone found me here, they would take me to a hospital and I couldn’t have that happen. Doctors usually get suspicious when patients heal their broken bones overnight. I would have a major problem on my hands and would be in breach of unspoken vampire rule number one.
Don’t do anything obvious to let on your existence.
I was able to get a couple of fingers around the phone and drag it out of my bag in front of me. There was no way I could dial or place a call, but I had to press the main button long enough so I could give a voice command.
I rested a few seconds, the stinging sensation in my body taking over my mind, and I knew that no matter how bad it was right now, I would be okay.
I moved my pointer finger on my right hand and realized that it wasn’t broken. My hand must have been, though, because each time I moved the finger up and down, a sharp shot of pain went right up my arm and made my eyes water. I almost cried out, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.
Inhaling deeply, I put my finger on the phone button and depressed it with as little movement in my hand as possible.
When I heard the robotic voice ask what I wanted, I mustered up all my focus and told it to call Lola.
I relaxed my hand as I saw the call had been placed, and I hoped to God she picked up. I didn’t have a plan B.
“Hey,” Lola said calmly on the other end of the phone, probably thinking I was calling to share some news or ask a quick question.
“I need you to come get me,” I said, though it was slurred and gargled. If Lola didn’t understand the exact words, she should get the overall message.
“Vic? What’s wrong?”
“Come get me,” I sa
id again. Little black spots were forming in my vision and my ears were ringing.
Between the pain of my broken bones, the stinging sensation of the healing process, the black spots and the ringing, it was like every sensation in the entire universe had been turned up to full volume and was competing for my attention.
“Where are you?”
That was the end. I couldn’t get the words out, but I knew I didn’t need to.
6
I heard voices first, and then I felt hands on me.
Matt and Lola spoke to each other and tried to speak to me, but I wasn’t able to answer. They had found me and that was all that mattered at the moment. I’d talk when some of my bones had finished healing.
I knew I looked horrible by the way they were speaking to one another. I was glad I was only semi-conscious and my brain wasn’t able to take in all the information it needed to get a status update on my body. Ignorance was bliss, and I was doing my best to remain as ignorant as possible.
“You’re going to have to just pick her up,” I heard Lola say, and Matt responded with something that indicated he didn’t think that was a good idea.
“It’ll be agony, but she’ll heal.”
Matt bent down beside me and put both his hands underneath my body.
“Sorry,” he said as he picked me up.
Then I felt something that made me think the universe had exploded.
The pain was so intense as to almost force my spirit out of my body. My body crunched together where it was broken as Matt jostled me while he walked. I would have wished for death if it was possible and if I didn’t have a task to do. But something was keeping me going through this, knowing I just needed to get back to my apartment to heal. And in the morning I’d be as good as new.
But it was a long way to morning.
* * *
That night was the longest of my life.
And that’s saying something.
Matt and Lola got me back to my apartment, and though I wasn’t fully aware of them, I could feel their anxiety. I had the impression they nervously moved through the apartment.
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