by Karen Ranney
In the dark depths of my soul where the most important wishes and wants were held like treasures, I wanted more than that. I wanted a husband who adored me. I wanted someone who liked me, who thought I was sexy, that I was his Playboy centerfold, the culmination of all his dreams and desires. He would do silly things that he never thought he would ever do, like sending me flowers because it was Tuesday, or leaving me notes on the refrigerator like, “Be home soon, honey. Doug wanted me to come over and see his man cave. But wait until I come home and show you mine.”
Then, a little deeper into my subterranean soul, excavated and revealed only under threat of death to all those I loved, was the desperate wish for children. I didn't care if they were girls or boys. I didn't care if I had one or two or five. I wanted squabbles and shouting and arguments about Sally staring at me, and Bobby taking my diary, of seeing if toothbrushes were really wet, and giving lectures of how soap is your friend. I wanted to sit on the side of the bed and hear my child’s prayers, look up and see my husband leaning against the door jamb and know the perfect joy of love in a dozen manifestations.
I wanted to have crying jags occasionally, especially when I doubted myself. I wanted to be angry at my husband for something silly and nonsensical. I wanted to be confused and certain, wise and stupid. I wanted all life had to offer and to gulp it down in greedy, gluttonous swallows.
I wanted to love, to feel my heart open so wide the emotion burst out of my chest. I wanted it to shine on people I never knew. I wanted strangers to turn, look at me and say to themselves: “There’s a happy woman."
That was my life, all mapped out in my imagination. And it never, ever came close to happening. I could whine about that for the rest of my life or deal with what I had. I decided to whine a little first before getting all adult.
Being an adult was not all it was cracked up to be, frankly.
I sat staring at the wall for long enough that the little voice inside my head started kicking at some of the brain cells. I had to do something, but I didn’t know what to do.
I've always had a habit of making lists to help me cope, to help me plan, and make some organized, rational sense of my life. I went to the desk, plunked myself down with both forearms on the desk, hands clasped under my chin. I stared at the wall in front of me again. Nothing like getting inspiration from drywall.
Finally, I grabbed the pad of paper and a pen and wrote: Things I Know at the top.
1. I am a Pranic vampire, considered a goddess in ancient lore.
2. I can do lots of nifty things other vampires can't do.
3. I suspect I can do a lot more nifty things and I need to figure out what they are.
4. I haven't the slightest idea who my friends are, but I have a damn good idea who the enemies are.
5. I am pregnant. In addition to protecting myself, I now have a child to guard with my life.
6. If my child was born with fangs, breast feeding was out.
Okay, as a beginning list, it wasn't bad. In fact, I was ahead of my game. A month ago I didn't know I was a goddess, for example. I didn't know I could do the little zapping things that I could do. All I had to do was concentrate on something and direct my hands toward the offending article/creature, and he got a jolt of energy from me. I was sort of a walking taser.
I tore off two more sheets of paper and wrote Friends on one and Enemies on the other.
How sad was it that it was easier to start with the Enemies list?
Maddock topped the list, of course, followed by my mother. That wasn't as depressing as it seemed on the surface. I had years to get used to the idea of Demi not feeling all Madonna-like around me. I added the OTHER and all the quasi-religious groups. Right now, unfortunately, I had to add the witches to the Enemies list, at least until I heard from their representatives.
Depressed, I reached for the Friends list and put Ophelia/Charlie on it.
Then I added Dan, because after all was said and done, I have never suffered because of him or his actions. In fact, he had protected me from the very beginning. Why, I don’t know. Maybe it was his good guy training as a Ranger. Maybe he just didn’t like my odds: Marcie vs the rest of the world.
If it turned out that he was strictly human, didn’t want anything, and was just as he appeared, then he got my vote for being the most selfless, kind, compassionate, empathetic, sexy, nice guy I've ever known. In fact, Dan might be the nicest guy in the world.
Mike and I had a weird relationship. He was still mad that I’d slipped out when he was supposed to guard me, which meant Dan had been furious with him. But I’d done a little matchmaking and he was dating Kenisha when he wasn’t fighting for his life. I added him to my Friends list.
I didn't know where to put Kenisha, so I grabbed a third sheet of paper and wrote Maybe on the top and added Kenisha's name to that list. She was a vampire, so she was subject to the Council’s rules. Um, so was I, since I was technically a vampire, but I’d gone so far afoul of their dictates that I’d probably be burned at the stake - in daylight - if they ever figured out everything I’d done, like giving Niccolo Maddock a dose of rabies.
If he’d only start foaming at the mouth, I’d be one happy goddess.
I wrote Nonnie's name to the Maybe list, too. The jury was still out about the witches, and as much as I wanted to think that my grandmother would put her coven aside for my welfare, I wasn't sure that was true.
There, my allies and enemies on three sheets of paper. The paucity of the allies list concerned me, especially since I was going to need lots of people in my corner fast.
I pressed my hand over my abdomen in a gesture of protectiveness I suspected that every pregnant woman has made at one time or another. I didn’t know what this child was, hybrid of vampire and goddess, or leaning toward human with witch blood. Double witch blood, come to think of it, since my grandmother was a witch and Dan’s mother and sister were witches.
Double, double, toil and lots o’trouble.
I needed information about everything.
What did a baby vampire look like? What were the laws, especially custody laws, about vampire babies? I would be willing to bet that the Council, who ruled over vampires, didn't have a damn thing in their Green Book about custody of vampire children.
If I were lucky, the child would be Dan's. But the way my luck was going lately, I wasn't going to bet on anything.
I couldn’t stay in my room with only taking potty breaks for Charlie. First of all, it wasn’t fair to my dog. Secondly, I owed Dan an explanation. Plus, I needed to find out what the witches were planning on doing. You didn’t mess around with witches and I’d left a meeting called for my benefit. There was sure to be some bad feelings, so I needed to smooth ruffled feathers.
I had to know more about vampires. I’d only attended one session in my orientation class and that just wasn’t enough. I’d met with my instructor, a woman I called Eagle Lady because of her unfortunate resemblance to said bird, but she'd turned out to be a snake in the grass, which is probably giving snakes a bad name. She’d gone to Maddock with personal information I’d given her.
I could always go to Kenisha, hoping she didn’t spread my curiosity around, but Kenisha was still sitting vigil over Mike. That’s another thing on my list, to check on Mike. Even hiding myself away in my room for a day didn't mean that I'd forgotten what Maddock had done to my bodyguard.
As a goddess, there was remarkably little I could do. I had no talent in healing. The only thing special about me, other than the zappy thing, was that I suspected I had some ability in astral projection, which sounds all New Age and woo woo. In other words, my consciousness could be somewhere my body wasn’t.
The first time it had happened I'd been here in this room and felt witches around me. I'd imagined myself on a river and the whole situation had felt so real I wouldn't have been surprised to find mud squishing between my toes.
I really had to practice that and anything else that might help keep me safe.
“Is it getting time for dinner?” Opie asked, stretching, revealing Charlie's manhood in all its glory.
I couldn’t help but smile at both of them.
Then it hit me. I'd been overlooking a perfect source of vampire information.
Chapter Three
They're Not Dead; They're Just Un-Alive
Granted, Opie had only attended one orientation session, just like me. Getting murdered kind of puts the kibosh on further education. But she'd deliberately become a vampire. To do that she had to pass some kind of psychological examination in addition to being interviewed by a couple of vampire committees. Surely she had to learn a lot about the Frater Cruentus, Il Duce’s favorite name for vampires.
Her reason, as she’d told me the night she died, was that she hadn’t wanted to grow old and ugly. I don’t think she gave any thought to growing old and furry.
"How about some liver?" I asked, certain the kitchen must have chicken liver floating around. God knows they had everything else. “If I can get you some liver, will you answer a few questions for me?"
Charlie rolled over on his stomach and regarded me with unabashed lust in his eyes.
"Liver?"
I wasn't certain who was asking me the question, Opie or Charlie. I decided to make it a half-and-half proposition and answer them both.
"Liver. No onions, since they're bad for dogs."
“Liver pate with crudities?”
"I presume you're talking carrots and celery sticks and little toasted bread things.”
Charlie's head bobbed.
“Crudities it is,” I said.
"I would answer your questions anyway, Marcie. You know that. But I'm particularly fond of liver pate."
I smiled. I would've given her liver even if she didn't answer any questions. I think we were bonding, Charlie and Opie and me. A triumvirate of the truly weird.
"By the way, we need to go see the vet today about your stitches."
Charlie looked away, put his head on his paws, and sighed gustily.
I decided to go ahead with the questions before canine petulance overwhelmed ghostly cooperation.
I wasn’t all that prepared, to be honest. I needed to know a lot of things, some of which involved vampire politics. In the meantime, I was going to stick to the basics. As I’ve mentioned before, what I knew about vampires (other than the experience with my stepfather, Paul) had been mostly condensed through popular culture, books and movies. Most of those myths about the undead were wrong.
So, let's start at the beginning, shall we?
“Are you afraid of garlic?"
“Everyone can tell if you've eaten garlic. Even the next day. And if you've eaten a lot, it seems to seep out of your pores. But afraid of it, no.”
I remembered my first experience of garlic and blood. Il Duce told me that they used garlic to mask the taste of blood for the newly fledged vampires. Otherwise, it was too much. Blood was, if you’ll pardon the expression, an acquired taste. Thank the Lord and all the archangels that I didn’t have to acquire it.
"What about mirrors? Could you see yourself in the mirror before the, um, incident?"
"I could," she said. “And if I must say, I was quite good-looking."
Charlie's tail shook, feathered out, then lay on the floor, almost like Opie was throwing her hair over her shoulder.
“How much does Charlie realize about you?” I asked, curious. “Does he have a consciousness? Does he mind you being there?”
If what I thought was true, I’d never known Charlie without Opie around. The first night I’d met him I’d been running for my life on the school grounds of the Vampire Training Academy. Opie had already been dead by then and found herself possessing a golden retriever.
"I don't think he minds, and yes, he's most definitely here. He quite likes you. And Dan." She made the strangest sound, almost like a purr. "I quite like Dan, too."
I would have to warn Dan not to let Charlie hump his leg. It wouldn't be what he thought it was.
Opie came and sat on the chaise and propped her chin on my knee.
“To truly understand what a vampire is," she said, “is to forget everything you thought you knew.”
I had already figured most of that out myself, but I remained silent.
“A vampire is a vampire because he’s contracted a mutation, one passed on from one vampire to another. It causes your organs to go into stasis.” She looked at me. “You know what stasis is don't you?”
I nodded.
She answered as if I hadn’t responded. “Medically, it’s defined as stagnation, but it means more than that with vampires. It’s basically when the cells exist in a state of suspended animation.”
Charlie addressed himself to an itch on his leg, then let Opie return to the lecture.
“Vampires aren’t like zombies.” Charlie shook his entire body as if he were wet.
I was going to have to address the zombie question, but not right this moment.
“Is drinking blood one of those myth things?” I remembered the first time I’d gotten a case of O Positive from Fed Ex. My stomach still turned at the memory.
She shook her head. “The mutation is a delicate balancing act. Vampires drink blood to keep more cells from dying off, and replacing those few that might have died. The new blood takes on the mutation, but never changes the state of the host. A vampire could replace his entire blood volume and never go back to being human.”
She scratched again before returning to the subject. “More vampires die each year from cell destruction than any other kind of death,” she said.
I’d never heard that before.
“That’s why they take such care with their health. A common cold can kill a vampire. He has no immune system. If he doesn’t replace the red blood cells that die, he’s toast.”
“So, if you’ve got a cold, that means you have to feed more often?”
She nodded. “That’s just with a cold. If they get any other kind of diseases, especially blood born things like anemia or leukemia, they almost always die.”
“Then why are they so afraid of the sun?”
She gave me a very human exasperated look from warm brown doggy eyes.
“Everything a vampire does is to protect himself. One of the reasons they don't go out in the sun is that the skin cannot regenerate. A human being gets a sunburn. The skin peels, new skin replaces the old. Once a vampire gets a burn, the skin is dead and it’s never coming back. It’s like being skinless. They don’t actually turn to dust like popular culture states. They just evaporate without skin to protect themselves. The same thing with the rest of a vampire’s organs. They have to be preserved and protected just as they are, because if they’re damaged in any way, there's no such thing as a liver transplant or a spleen removal. In actuality, vampires are very delicate creatures.”
I was trying to wrap my head around Il Duce being a delicate creature and couldn't quite make it.
“And you wanted to be a vampire?” I ask, amazed.
She nodded. “Stasis means that nothing changes. You are what you are at the moment you acquire the mutation. You never get older.”
I had a question, but she answered it before I got a chance to ask.
“Vampires aren’t stronger than other creatures, even human beings. They’ve created this whole mythology to protect themselves.”
“Maddock can fly,” I said. Okay, maybe he couldn’t fly, but he could levitate pretty damn well. I’d been on the other side of the glass on the second story. He’d hovered.
She didn’t look surprised.
“Very old vampires can sometimes acquire other skills and traits, some of them from creatures they might have ingested.”
Thank heavens I hadn’t eaten anything. I was feeling just the teensiest bit queasy.
“You mean like bats and things?”
“Maybe. Or it could be that they’ve simply mutated themselves, the older they get. Younger vampires don’t have those traits.”
“What about the ability to compel?” I asked.
“That’s something odd. The brain is affected by stasis, but not in the way you would think. In a human, brain cells don’t regenerate except in the hippocampus. In a vampire, the cells don’t regenerate, but they don’t die, either. Vampires can do things mentally that humans can’t do, and compulsion is one of them.”
“I can compel,” I said. “Only humans, though. But I can’t stand the taste of blood. And walking in the sun isn’t a problem.”
Opie did a Charlie/dog shrug, which meant that one shoulder lifted and then dropped.
“You’re different from other vampires,” Opie was saying. “You aren’t walking the line, like they do, between death and life. Your organs are working. You don’t need blood to continue to replace those cells that have died. You’re manufacturing them on your own. In other words, you haven’t entered stasis.”
“Does that mean I won’t be immortal?”
“Most vampires aren’t immortal,” she said. “They can live for hundreds of years if they’re careful, if they monitor themselves. Most simply get tired of all the trouble and deliberately infect themselves with something.”
“What do you mean, if they monitor themselves?”
“Have you ever seen a blood glucose monitor?” she asked. “The kind that people with diabetes use to measure their blood sugar?”
I nodded.
“There’s one for vampires. It’s called a cell viability monitor, a CVM.”
“And it was developed by MEDOC, wasn’t it?” I asked. That’s probably how Maddock had made his millions, if not billions.
She looked surprised at the question, but nodded.
“When the CVM indicates that cells are dying at an advanced rate, the vampire feeds.”