I tucked the card into the pocket of my jeans and wondered if I should invite him into my living room, feed him tea and crumpets or the Italian version of that. What was the Italian version?
He settled my dilemma by glancing down at the case of blood by the door. Bending, he pried the styrofoam top off. Surprise flashed over his face.
“You have not touched the blood,” he said, straightening.
I shook my head.
“Are you not hungry?”
“Not for blood.”
“But you are eating?” he asked, his attention on my midriff. Was he checking for extra pounds?
I nodded. “I’m eating. I’m just not eating blood.”
“As in what?”
“Do you want a list?”
He nodded.
“Ribs. Rice. Anything with pasta. Enchiladas. Cheeseburgers.”
Did he need to know about the drive thru expeditions I’d made in the last week? I decided not to tell him about Popeyes and Arby’s.
“Do not speak of this,” he said.
My heartbeat escalated. “Is there something wrong with me?”
His face eased into a placid expression. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t exactly convincing, but I kept quiet instead.
“We will talk about this later. You will be there tomorrow?”
“I’ll be there,” I said.
“Do not speak of this to anyone, Marcie,” he said again.
Before I could ask him exactly what he meant, Il Duce was gone, opening the door and vanishing in a puff of air.
A neat trick and one I definitely wanted to learn.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Those who live by the fang shall die by the fang
At nine the next night I dressed in my go to work clothes which meant I was conservative: a dark blue suit, white blouse, and red earrings and shoes. Call me Miss Patriotic.
I smiled at myself in the mirror, startled by how white my teeth were. I leaned forward to examine my incisors. From the brochure I knew these teeth were now hollow. Newly created bone like protrusions would snick down when I pushed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. Since I was a Fledgling my fangs were still soft and I wasn’t allowed to use them yet.
I pulled back, smiled at myself again and wondered when I was supposed to grow all gray and undead looking. The vampires I knew didn’t look dead. They looked flushed and glowing and so did I, my cheeks blossoming with color, my lips pink enough not to need any lipstick. I slathered on some lip swelling shiny stuff anyway.
I wanted to stretch the envelope and wear a feminine - read sexy - lace camisole beneath my jacket, but I didn't have any idea what the Vampire Academy was like, let alone what they would ask me to do. For all I knew, I would be forced to run an obstacle course.
In my pre-fang days – and I needed to know how long my fangs would take to harden – I never noticed vampires much. Oh, the men, of course. The men were absolutely gorgeous and they had something about them, a glow, a confidence attracting women. I was definitely attracted.
Which was yet another question: was I going to get a come-hither stare? What kind of moral laws did vampires follow? The Vampire Code of Conduct didn’t cover morality. All it stated were three rules:
You shall not transform anyone without the express written approval of the Council. Doing so is subject to Death.
You shall not use your abilities to thwart or undermine the laws of the municipality and state in which you live. You shall obey all civil laws under which non-Kindred live, including those of property, marriage, and inheritance.
You shall recognize the Council as the supreme authority for all criminal and civil matters dealing with the Kindred.
Three commandments, although it seemed to me there ought to be more for vampires. Why do humans get ten while vampires only get three?
Thou shalt not use thy mesmerizing power to get dates.
Thou shalt not smell like something yummy.
Il Duce hadn’t smelled like anything. Had I lost the ability to smell vampires? Or did vampires only smell to the living?
To another vampire, did we, well - for lack of a better word - smell normal?
Yet another question, one propelling me out the door and to my car. I wasn’t eager to go to school but I needed answers to some of my questions.
To my surprise the Academy was located way out Bitters Road, farther than I’d ever driven. A half dozen two-story sandstone colored buildings sprawled across a few acres, making it look like a community college not a learning institution for the newly fanged. Or maybe they did more here than teach the uninitiated.
The campus was illuminated by lamps giving off a soft, bluish, almost moonlight, glow.
Texas Red Oaks draped themselves over the campus, stretching upward in an attempt to scratch the night sky. In March, the woods surrounding Vampire Academy would be the color of blood as the leaves turned, then fell.
Someone had thought ahead.
I followed the octagonal orange signs for Orientation, wishing I had gotten more information from His Grace.
Being a vampire didn't make me feel more confident. In fact, it was the opposite. Being an insurance adjuster hadn’t made me a prime target for haters. Being a vampire did. Now there were groups out to get me. The Militia of God, Council of Human Creationism, National Association for the Advancement of Humans - vampires were among the equal opportunity hated.
But I had chosen this life, since the alternative had been so unpalatable. For heavens sake, I was only in my thirties. Maybe a few years of being a vampire would teach me walking into the sun was a much better idea. For now, I wasn’t crazy about the idea of shuffling off this mortal coil. (I told you I was an English major.)
An orange octagonal sign the size of a Volkswagen sat in front of the Orientation building, as if newly turned vampires were either myopic or a little dense.
The wind had come up in the last hour and now it pushed impatiently against the car as if prodding me to leave and walk the hundred feet or so to the building.
Instead, I sat with my hands clenched on the wheel, staring through the windshield, wondering if I could claim a sudden illness.
Vampires don’t get sick, do they? They leech off people who were alive. Well, I hadn’t leeched, a term the Green Book said was derogatory and not to be used.
My stomach clenched, the vampire equivalent of nerves, something I’d learned in the past two weeks. I could also tell when the sun was about to rise, because I felt as if a blanket had fallen over me, bathing me in a gray shadow. I was exhausted and had no choice but to fall on my bed in a stupor.
One thing about being a vampire I thoroughly enjoyed: I no longer suffered from occasional insomnia.
I got out of the car, beeped the alarm on, and grabbed my purse, slinging it over my shoulder and bumping myself in the butt like I always did. Since my purse was a mini-suitcase, the bump was substantial.
“One of these days,” my grandmother had told me BF (Before Fangdom), “you’re going to injure your back with a purse that heavy. You’ll be a stoop shouldered old woman.”
I guess I didn’t have to worry about being old anymore. Or carrying my laptop and case files with me.
The wind was warm, a taste of the desert in the middle of an oasis city. Below it hovered a cooler breeze hinting at winter.
The sidewalk was curved, a serpentine approach to a rectangular building, so bland it could have been uprooted and placed anywhere to become anything: a Walmart, a library, a business.
A double set of glass doors greeted me, along with the orange octagonal sign again. Below it was written:
Fledgling Orientation
Donor Orientation
The second one floored me. Donor orientation? What are donors taught? Don’t get bitten too hard or you’ll wake up in the VRC like I did? Beware the eyes of Doug, or his libido. That, especially.
Did they send out mailings about Vampire Academy courses the general public could take? Things like: “I
s your boss a vampire? Learn how to cope with his midnight calls.” Or: “Thinking of dating a vampire girl? Tips to know to keep yourself safe.” If they had, I might have known a little more about the whole species.
I pulled open the door, fighting the wind as it pushed me into the building. Pine-Sol, floor wax, and dried eucalyptus in the flower arrangement on the reception desk flooded my nose and made my eyes water. Below it was another odor, something heavier. Blood.
Closing my eyes, I concentrated on that one scent. Yes, it was blood but it wasn’t fresh. Yet there was enough it seemed to saturate the ground on which the building stood.
Did the donors donate on site? Or did this plot of land have a darker history?
“Can I help you?”
I blinked open my eyes to find a pert young thing standing behind the reception desk looking as officious as an eighteen year old could look. But what did I know? She could be older than my grandmother.
Her hair was black, slicked back from her face to form a ponytail ending below her shoulders. Intent blue eyes narrowed at me in a Nurse Ratched stare.
“I’m supposed to report to Orientation,” I said, approaching the counter.
“Fledging or donor?”
“Fledgling,” I said.
She smiled. Evidently, she was one of the Kindred. She probably was two hundred years old.
“Room 201,” she said, pointing to the stairs. “You’d better hurry, though, the class starts in three minutes. Miss Renfrew hates tardiness and locks the door at exactly ten.”
Renfrew? Seriously?
I nodded my thanks and took the stairs at a healthy clip, instantly transformed to a teenager in high school.
Room 201 turned out to be a small cell like room at the head of the stairs. I entered, bobbing my head in a gesture of submission I recognized and hated even as I did it.
The woman standing at the whiteboard glowered at me, her glasses reflecting the overhead fluorescent lights. Her nose was splayed on her face like a chicken’s foot, the alar sidewalls depressed, the tip pointing downward. Her chin was sharp enough to cut but a perfect compliment to the boniness of the rest of her face and a mouth thinned to a straight line.
I was immediately reminded of an eagle.
“Montgomery?”
I nodded, taking my place at the desk in the back of the class.
Four other people sat in the cinderblock room, each of them turning to stare at me as I tried to tuck my purse inside the little cubby below the seat, realized it wouldn’t fit, then put it on the floor under my knees.
The desk was made for a munchkin, fitted with a slanted top. I folded my hands on the surface like a good little girl, lifting my face toward Ms. Renfrew and studiously ignored my fellow students.
They gradually faced forward, leaving me the freedom to study them. Evidently, vampires believed in diversity.
In front of me was a young man with sleek black hair almost bluish in the light and cut in a bowl shape. He wore a t-shirt and jeans, his sneakers bright red with black laces. From the quick look I’d gotten of him, he was Asian, his face plump, his eyes hidden behind round glasses.
The girl in front of him had hair as red as blood. Here was the paleness I’d expected. Her skin was so white as to be translucent. She was stunningly lovely and I instantly envied her the air of cool self-possession surrounding her.
She wore a soft yellow dress more suited to summer than the onset of autumn, but it suited her, made her look like a garden sprite, a creature of fairy-like beauty.
The woman sitting on the other side of the aisle was black, her hair in dreadlocks, arranged in a clump and tied with a pink bandana proclaiming “Freedom!” Her ankle length dress was black with purple flowers the size of skillets splashed on it. She glanced at me more than once, her brown eyed gaze simultaneously assessing and dismissive.
“As I was saying,” Ms. Renfrew said, “the test is to assess your knowledge of your new species.”
“Nobody said there was going to be a test,” I said, a little louder than I intended.
Ms. Renfrew’s lips grew even thinner. “You will not be graded, Montgomery. We’re merely trying to determine the depth of your ignorance.”
I clamped my mouth shut, sat back, and forced a professional - and utterly false - smile to my face.
The middle aged man to my left smiled at me in commiseration. The guayabera he was wearing was thickly embroidered white on white, his black trousers creased and his shoes highly polished.
He had a paunch pressing against the edge of the desk and since he wiggled more than once, he was probably uncomfortable. He reminded me of another question I had - did vampires remain overweight?
I took the page Ms. Renfrew handed me, dug in my purse for a pen, and began to take the test.
The first question stumped me, which didn’t bode well for the rest of the pop quiz.
List the ways you can die.
I wrote what I thought was the answer: staked and walking into the sun. One other, according to a book series I liked, physically separating my head from my body.
But it was the next question that stunned me, enough to make me stare at the paper for a long time:
List three other paranormal species.
CHAPTER NINE
A neck a day keeps the grave away
Felipe was the man to my left. Meng sat in front of me, behind the beautiful redhead. She was Ophelia, a name curiously suiting her.
“Call me Opie,” she said, when introducing herself. “All my friends do.”
The black woman was Kenisha, but knowing her name didn’t make her any friendlier.
Ms. Renfrew, Eagle Lady, had dismissed us a few minutes ago. At the door, she handed each of us a plastic envelope sealed with wax.
"This is your homework," she said. "Do not open it until you get home. What you need to study is based on your incorrect answers to the quiz.”
I could only imagine what my homework was. I don't think I’d gotten any of the questions right.
“How did you do?" Felipe asked.
“I sucked," I confessed. “I didn't know anything about vampire history, like burying a corpse upside down. Or blood seeping from the left eye of a vampire."
"I didn't know all the names," he said. "Estries, Lamia, Striges?" He shook his head. “And it's the first time I've ever heard of a chupacabra being considered a vampire."
As a native of San Antonio, I’d grown up with Mexican folklore, including learning about the chupacabra, a doglike monster. The chupacabra was rumored to do a lot of things, but I agreed with Felipe, I’d never heard it called a vampire before.
“Just how many ways can we die?”
Miss Freedom turned and smiled at me which was a disconcerting experience given she had two bright gold front teeth fixed with diamonds.
“Three," she said.
“Three?”
She held up her hand, her fingers tucked into a fist. "One," she said, extending one finger. "Walking into the sun." The second finger popped up. "Two. Blood loss." A third finger appeared. “A blood borne illness.”
I hadn’t heard about the blood born illness part.
“Like what?”
“Leukemia,” Felipe said.
“Anemia,” Opie contributed.
Meng only shrugged.
I shook my head. Prior to my interlude with Doug, I hadn’t hung around vampires much. My stepfather didn’t count. He creeped me out. Or maybe what bothered me most was my mother’s reaction to him. She would sit and smile at him like an automaton, waiting for him to turn her on.
Therefore, I didn’t know a lot of things people probably knew who counted vampires among their friends.
“What about losing your head?"
“You can die if your head is cut off, sure. But you can die if you lose an arm or a leg, too. It’s the blood loss that will kill you.”
Either Kenisha didn't like me for some reason, or she made a point of being surly to people she didn’t know.
That's why I was surprised when it was her suggestion we all go out to dinner together.
I was lonely which is the only reason I agreed. Less than fifteen minutes later I pulled into the crowded parking lot of The Smiling Senorita.
The wind had picked up, blowing leaves around the tires, sighing as if it had a voice. Two weeks ago I wouldn’t have asked this question, but knowing what I did now, it didn't seem so odd. Was the wind a living entity? Did it have a consciousness of itself? Had all those times when I thought the wind sounded lonely been real?
I shook my head at myself, opened the car door, and immediately changed my mind. We must be getting a blue norther, because the temperature had dropped by twenty degrees.
I reached into the back seat and grabbed the thick gray wool sweater I kept in the car for occasions like this. San Antonio had the weirdest seasons. One day you were certain it was going to be a balmy sixty or seventy degrees for the rest of the autumn and winter months, only to be jolted into reality when the temperature suddenly plunged.
You could always tell someone who had moved to San Antonio from the north. They laughed at us natives when we shivered at fifty degrees. On those rare occasions when we stayed below freezing for more than a day? We were bundled up like Nanook of the North.
I got out of the car, dropped my purse on the seat and put on my sweater, tucking my hair beneath the hood. Another question I had. Was my hair going to continue to grow? Or was I stuck with the same shoulder length for eternity? Would it get thinner and thinner as time passed? Did they have wigs designed specifically for vampires?
I knew The Smiling Senorita well. The Mexican restaurant was open twenty-four hours a day, catering to tourists, truckers, moviegoers and anyone else who found themselves awake at three and craving great Mexican food. Open since 1940, The Smiling Senorita was a San Antonio landmark. I hadn't been here in months and when I entered through the archway, I remembered why. The noise level was astounding.
Bright green, yellow, and red Christmas tree lights were strung along the edge of the ceiling. A foot from the top of the wall, a model railroad train track was mounted on a shelf. Periodically, the train and its eleven cars would travel through the restaurant, billowing smoke and tooting its horn.
The Fertile Vampire Page 4