Her mother's face registered surprise, and then she smiled. "Oh, only about once a week. No big deal."
Dell laughed, realizing her mother was teasing her. "No, really, Mom. Were you ever tempted that way?"
"No."
"Never?"
"Never. You're my flesh and my blood. Your father and I would have set ourselves on fire before we'd bring harm to you."
Dell breathed a sigh of relief. She didn't know how she would have handled the thought that her parents had hungered for her. "Okay, thanks, Mom. I didn't think you did, but I had to find out."
Her mother gave her a hug and opened the door. She paused on the threshold. "Do you think you're up for school tomorrow?"
"I can try. I guess if I feel out of sorts once I get there, I can call you at work and come home."
"That's my girl! I'm sure you'll be fine. The faster you get back into your normal routine, the better off you'll be. Remember, you graduate this year. And at the top of your class!"
Dell smiled as her mother left the room. Her mother loved and appreciated her. She was proud of all her accomplishments.
Restless now, Dell went to her dressing table and sat down before the mirror. She didn't look different. The sores that had erupted so rapidly were now healed, not even leaving scars. She was tan and fit, a girl verging on womanhood, and the only change she could detect was the look in her eyes. That look was one of knowledge and sadness. She knew now of death and of living on after death as a new being. Would her friends and classmates notice her eyes? Would they suspect she was different? Maybe she could wear sunglasses for a while, like some of the weird kids in school. She could say she had a sty. Or pink eye. Everyone hated getting pink eye.
She wouldn't know how her friends would react to her, though, until she went back to school and faced them.
"I can do this," she said aloud, turning away from the mirror and the dead look in her eyes. "I can live again."
~*~
It took Dell two more days before she was ready to face the world outside her home. During that time, with her parents at work and Eddie at school, she wandered the empty house and tried to stay away from the transfusion bags in the refrigerator. Given her deep hunger, she thought she could down them all at once. The idea made her laugh, but the sudden sound of laughter in the quiet house gave her pause. She rubbed the back of her neck where the hair there had crept up. To ease her mind into trance, she tried to watch television. Think nothing and nothing will matter, she told herself, hunting down the remote where her little brother had stashed it between the sofa cushions.
Usually TV talk shows could turn her into a mindless vegetable, but it didn't work this time. She watched Jerry Springer, horrified at the guests as most Americans were, and remembered she'd heard her parents talking about a Predator in Fort Worth, Texas, who got himself booked on there one time to discuss the vampire "legend." Mentor was called in to squelch the renegade, for it was bandied about among the Predator community that the vampire doing the show was disgruntled and mentally unstable. He promised the Springer show that he would show his fangs and even take a victim under the watchful eye of the camera, if they wanted. A willing victim, if they could find one.
Secrecy was everything to vampires. Without it, they weren't safe. Rarely did anyone get out of hand and try to give the secret to the media. Mentor went to the renegade and discussed his upcoming television appearance. He judged the vampire to be clearly unreliable, his mind teetering on the brink of insanity, and had taken him away for his own good, and the good of all vampires everywhere. The Springer people booked wannabe vampires instead.
Dell's parents did not know where the renegade was taken, but they understood there was a place, a monastery run by vampire monks somewhere in another part of the world. Was it Asia? The far reaches of China? There someone could be kept prisoner until well, or if it was judged he would never be well again, rumor had it the prisoner was bound forever. There was no alternative.
Dell hoped the talk show hopeful hadn't been destroyed or imprisoned for the rest of his vampire life. She did not want to think about what it might be like to be held prisoner by powerful supernatural monks, but burning the renegade for turning to the media seemed to her too harsh a judgment. Go on Jerry Springer and die for it. She almost laughed aloud again, thinking cynically that some of the guests ought to have that option.
Maybe she would ask Mentor what had happened to the renegade vampire. . . .
Turning off the TV, she wandered the rooms again, peeking through the drawn curtains at the postage stamp-sized front yard. Their house looked similar to all the other houses on the street in the suburb. Brick, three bedrooms, two baths, two-car garage. Decidedly middle class. Which was about all her parents could afford, given that a majority of their income went to Predators for the blood.
They had lived in the house since she was born. Their neighbors knew them enough to speak to. Some neighbors had moved in and moved out again, their incomes taking them to more sophisticated habitats. The ones who stayed kept to themselves, so that a family of vampires could live unnoticed by curious humans.
Two of Dell's friends lived on the same street; she'd grown up with them. They had spent nights at one another's houses, had backyard barbecues together, played dolls under the shade of the crape myrtle. She had gone swimming with them at the neighborhood pool, discussed boys with them, and traded clothes.
Knowing her so well, would they ever guess she had changed? She couldn't let that happen. They'd never known about Eddie or her parents. Why should she think they'd discover her secret? No one believed in vampires anyway. It was the stuff of movies and books and TV shows. Quite a popular myth in entertainment now and again, but that made the reality of them even more fantastic. If Hollywood made them up, how could they be real? Impossible.
And some of the movies! They made her family laugh. They made them fall off their chairs laughing. What idiot had done those scripts, what nincompoop had written those books, they asked one another?
Dell had just rented an old video about vampires starring James Woods, one of her favorite actors. Even he could not make the inane dialogue come out as real—and if he couldn't, no one could. It was that bad. In the movie it was all the Catholic Church's fault there were vampires. An exorcism in the 1600s had gone badly. Hah! If only that was what it was. How easily the mistake could have been rectified. Near the end of the movie, with Jimmy Woods ransacking a vampire town with his trusty steel bow-and-arrow contraption, the arrow connected to a steel cord hooked to a Jeep to haul vampires out into the sun to burn, Dell got up and savagely turned off the VCR. This kind of thing made her angry. It made vampires look . . . like . . . animals. Rabid animals that had to be put out of their misery.
She wished that one day she could tell Hollywood how it really was, how difficult it was to maintain a normal existence, how heartbreaking it was to know you were cut off from mankind, how the prospect of living for many lifetimes over drained the soul of pity and hope. Not that they would believe her or that she would ever really want to tell them. No. She would not want Mentor tracking her down, taking her off to some dreary old monastery.
So her friends had their heads full of stupid movie ideas of what vampires should be and would never be looking for someone like her anyway. There was no reason for her closest friends to even have the thought that she was something other than human.
It would be the same as believing she was an alien from outer space, hatched from an egg.
Unless she did something really stupid, no one would ever know.
Then again, if she didn't learn how to breathe properly, she was going to be in one hell of a lot of trouble, she thought, realizing she hadn't taken a breath in minutes.
She sucked in air and let it out as she walked the house, room to room. If she ran, she would have to exert her will and pretend she was breathless. If someone were to accidentally knock her down or if she fell—which she supposed she probably wouldn't, ever agai
n, unless it was to fool someone, she would have to pretend she'd lost her breath. She must recall how she'd breathed naturally for seventeen years, unconsciously, and get into the habit of it all over again.
On the second day she thought she had mastered breathing so that it came more naturally to her. It was funny how the air tasted. It was as if the little sacs in her lungs had taste buds and relayed them to her brain, the same as her tongue did. The air in the living room sometimes recalled the taste and scent of popcorn left over from human guests. Sometimes it tasted of the tweed fabric on the sofas and sometimes it just seemed it was a room full of dust despite the fact that her mother was a neat housekeeper. The air in her bedroom was made up of distinct scents of lipstick and foundation powder and deodorant and peach toilet water. The bathroom—she tried to stay out of the bathroom. It tasted downright foul, with old, stale scents coming up from the drains of the tub and sink. Those particular bodily functions had ceased along with the end of her intake of food and drink. Pure blood did not produce waste. The bathrooms now were just places where they bathed and shaved.
On her second day home alone when Eddie got off the school bus, Dell met him at the door. He threw down his schoolbooks on the sofa and made for the kitchen. He never had to study anymore. His memory was phenomenal. All he had to do was glance over pages and they were committed forever to memory. That was a change Dell was looking forward to. Now perhaps she'd truly understand chemistry. She would soon tackle her father's computer, go on the Internet, and study the online encyclopedias. She'd end up acing her tests. She'd have more knowledge than a college grad. She wouldn't even need to go to college, except for the sheepskin she might want to show the world so they'd believe she was educated.
She followed Eddie to the kitchen, watched him take, a bag from the white cardboard box, and loft it higher than his face. He hadn't even said hello to her yet.
"You get really hungry at school, don't you?" she asked.
"Mmmm." He had his fangs in the bag, but he cut his gaze to her.
"Isn't it funny? It feels almost like when we were human and needed to eat food."
He nodded.
"But it's not really food, the blood. It just keeps us vibrant, gives us our energy back. It doesn't even go into our stomachs. And the hunger isn't centered there, is it? It's like . . . all over our bodies . . . or mostly in our brains. Like if our brains had teeth, they would crawl out to search for blood." The thought gave her a shiver. It made her think of zombie movies. More dumb stuff from Hollywood. She rubbed her arms.
"Mmmm."
He finished draining the bag and, with his foot, hit the garbage pail pedal. He dropped the bag inside. They were very careful to double bag their garbage for pickup. They didn't want some garbage man breaking open one of the bags all over the street, strewing dozens of plastic transfusion bags that were slick with rotting blood.
Eddie turned to her. "Is that what you do all day here, think about how everything's different?"
"Well, yeah, I guess I do. What did you think about?"
"Scaling Mount Everest,"
"No joke?"
He laughed, passing her by, heading for his room. "Yeah, it's a joke. I don't remember what I thought about. Girls, maybe."
She had to remember he'd changed two years before, so he was fourteen now even though he didn't look it. He was definitely in the girl stage. Some things stayed the same.
"I have some questions," she said, following on his heels.
He plopped down on his twin-sized bed, swinging his feet up, and put his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. "Shoot."
"You mentioned girls. You think about girls a lot, I guess. What are you going to do about it?"
"About what?" He hadn't taken his gaze off the ceiling, as if her questions might have their answers written there.
"About girls. Are you going to date? Have a girlfriend?"
He closed his eyes and didn't respond for several seconds. Finally, he said, "Mentor discussed that with me. He'll get around to it with you, too."
"Tell me what he said."
"I think he should tell you. Or what's the point of having Mentor?"
"Eddie!"
He opened his eyes and looked at her. "What?"
"Tell me," she said impatiently.
He shrugged. "You can't get involved . . . uh . . . romantically . . . with humans."
She had been afraid of that. Ryan Major's face floated into her mind. The boy who had just transferred to her school and who, before she'd changed, she had been hoping to find a way to meet. He didn't even know her yet. And now he probably never would. Some other girl, a cheerleader no doubt, would snag his attention and Dell would be lonely. All of her life! All of her many lives!
She sank down onto the side of her brother's bed. He moved his legs over to make room for her. "Do our kind ever fall in love? With another vampire, maybe?"
"I don't know."
"So we go through all the years to come without . . . without loving anyone?"
"Mentor didn't say that."
"I guess he wouldn't. I mean, Mom and Dad fell in love."
"Yeah, but they met before they changed," Eddie said carefully.
"Well? What did Mentor say? It isn't like our emotions died. How do we keep from, well, from falling in love?"
"You need to ask Mentor."
"I'm asking you!" She hit one of his legs with her fist. How come he was still a pesky kid brother? She wished he was thirty and smart.
"Well, I'm not thirty," he said, reading her mind. "But I am smart." He grinned widely. "Mentor said . . ." He paused.
She hit him again with her fist to jostle him.
"Stop it! That hurts. He said it's like the hunger. You don't want to ever kill someone, right?"
"Right. He told me that. How I might have to fight off the urge."
"You do the same thing about boys."
"I have to fight off falling in love?"
"Something like that."
"That's horrible! Mom and Dad found one another, and Grandma and Grandpa. Even Uncle Boyd and Uncle Daniel."
"I think they were all human and together before . . ." Eddie said.
"Oh. But Mom and Dad knew they might become vampire.”
"Now you have the gist of it," Eddie said.
"But if they'd already changed, they would still have gotten together, right?"
"I guess."
"You're saying then that I just have to stay away from humans. My only choice is someone like me."
"Ask Mentor."
Dell gave up. She rose from the bed and stomped out of the room to show her displeasure. She didn't want to talk about love and boys and marriage anyway. It had just come to her, that's all. What did he think, that she cared?
Eddie was sitting on the living room sofa holding his book bag when she entered the room.
"I wish you'd stop that." She meant how he appeared somewhere else all of a sudden. She'd left him on his bed and yet here he was in the living room.
"I can't help it if I can move instantaneously and you can't."
"I can't yet."
He grinned at her and unzipped his bag. "Give me a minute to flip through my history notes. I have a test tomorrow."
She found the remote and turned on the TV. "I hate TV," she said, feeling petulant and wanting to criticize everything around her.
"Then don't watch it."
She saw him open a notebook and begin turning the pages rapidly. In less than two minutes he closed it again and stuffed it back into the book bag.
She studiously ignored him. So what if she couldn't do anything with her powers yet? So what if there was no point in trying to talk to Ryan Major? She flipped the channel changer, going through various HBO cable channels. All the movies were either action flicks or romantic comedies. She was not in the mood for either.
"You're seriously pissed, aren't you?" Eddie asked. She changed the channel again.
"Look, there's more to it than wh
at I said. You'll just have to talk to Mentor about these things."
"Okay!" She mashed the channel changing button hard and saw the CNN news come on. She left it there, watching pictures of a flood in Ohio.
"No point in getting mad at me. It's not my idea. I'm left out in the cold, too, you know."
Dell reconsidered. Her temper, like every other emotion, seemed set on a hair trigger. "I'm sorry. I know it's not your fault. All this takes getting used to, that's all."
"Not all of it sucks," he said. Then he laughed. "Sucks. Get it?"
She couldn't smile. Eddie's jokes weren't all that good to begin with.
"Anyway, take it easy, Weezy. Things will work out."
Weezy. That almost made her laugh. He liked to be playful with her, rhyming a name for her with whatever he was saying at the moment. She expected some day he'd get to say, "There's a hitch, Bitch."
"What are you smiling at?" he asked, glancing at the flood waters on the TV screen.
"Nothing." She was surprised he hadn't read her mind.
"Want to play Monopoly?" he asked.
"You always beat me. You always get the hotels first."
"Chess?"
"Not now. I always get checkmated."
"Well, I'm going out. Tell Mom and Dad I've already eaten."
She watched him go, this time the normal way, one step at a time. She heard the front door shut. She was left with CNN and a reporter in hip boots and a yellow rain slicker.
She couldn't wait to get back to school.
Chapter 9
The first day back at school Dell was as nervous as a goose stranded in the center of a freeway. Cheyenne, one of her friends from her neighborhood, was waiting for her at the front entrance before classes started. "I tried to call, but your mom said you were in bed. What's up?"
Dell was careful not to look her in the eyes. She said, "Oh, the usual, you know, cramps and stuff."
"Oh, yeah, that. Maybe you need hormone shots."
Surprised, Dell said, "Why would I need that?"
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