by Lewis Aleman
The Anti-Vampire
( Anti-Vampire - 1 )
Lewis Aleman
Simon is a vampire, prowling through the dark New Orleans streets that pulse with wild adventure and fangs gleaming in the shadows. He's spent the last few decades as a recluse, aching over a lost love. Now, he's put it behind him, thirsting to fulfill the raging inner need he's deprived himself for so long.
Ruby feels isolated and out of place―lonely, shy, but too strong-minded to go along with the crowd. All that changes when she is dragged out for her birthday and ends up dancing with Simon―mysterious, blue-eyed, and gorgeous. Her body tingles watching his muscled form move―so fast, so smooth, so powerful. His smile is otherworldly, and his kiss charges her with electric energy. All seems to be going well until three other vampires appear in the crowd, turning the dance floor into a horror show.
The other vampires, led by the vicious Roderick, are after a new fix―_the new breed_. It's a mix of blood and something secret that's driven them to a desperate addiction, making them reckless and willing to tear anyone apart to get to it, and Ruby's best friend, Ambrosia, has something they need to make it. When Ambrosia flees New Orleans for her life, they relentlessly hunt the one person who knows where she is: Ruby.
Stalked by ravenous vampires at every turn, Ruby's only hope for survival is her handsome new love. Through crowded dance floors, wild forests, high-speed car races, and even into Roderick's horrific dwelling filled with hostile vampires, Simon risks his life trying to keep her safe while being outnumbered at every turn and mesmerized by her every second―even while facing death, danger, and darkness.
Lewis Aleman
The Anti-Vampire Tale
The first book in the Anti-Vampire series
There are such beings as vampires, some of us have evidence that they exist. Even had we not the proof of our own unhappy experience, the teachings and the records of the past give proof enough for sane peoples.
–Bram Stoker, Dracula, 1897
Chapter I
Regarding Vampires
I sit at the bar pondering the lust to rip flesh apart but not the heart to dive into it. I’ve deprived myself of its incomparable sweetness for the better part of five decades, but my body grows weary and my resolve is reduced to mere gossamer. The temptation consumes like nothing else.
The last time I lost control, it resulted in the death of the most beautiful face ever prematurely veiled. Either I’ve denied myself for so long to spare any other tender girl the same fate, or perhaps I haven’t been looking out for anyone but myself and simply haven’t seen another face that can compare to her memory, a face that could make me believe I’m more than I am, a beast full of never-ending bloodlust.
The reason why I’ve kept my yearning fangs out of young, taut female necks matters little. The end result is the same—I am tired of fighting and feel deader than those that are allowed to rest in afterlife. If I can’t have peace, then I’ll embrace the distraction of temptation—to give in and plant the sharp kiss that my body aches for into some pretty thing.
I sit in a mostly empty bar on Decatur, a place for people avoiding the Quarter crowd. The wooden planks on the walls are aged, and much like me, they no longer have the strength they once had. Nearby it’s very different. The clamor just down the street beckons me. The pounding of the hot, crowded dancing pulses through me. All that I’ve avoided and craved drinks, dances, and flirts within my reach. I can almost taste it in the air floating down this infamous street to me.
Adding to my frustrations, the world misunderstands us vampires. Few believe we exist. Those that do believe have such strange notions of what we are.
The most absurd notion is that a bitten human will turn into a vampire. It’s biologically ridiculous. You are a human because you have human DNA. Vamps have their own cursed genes. A vamp can no easier change your DNA into that of a bloodsucker than your dog could bite your ankles and make you chase cars, roll over, and become fixated with sniffing other canine rumps. A bite can only transfer saliva and blood. Drinking a giraffe’s blood or saliva can’t mystically make you 15 feet tall with a long, spotted neck. Neither can vamp blood turn you into one of us. There is no magic substance to make you into another being.
The only thing you’ll turn into from a vampire biting your neck is, if he or she indulges for a moment too long, a dead human.
Secondly, vampires are not regal and elegant. Blood junkies are dirty addicts. When was the last time you saw a junkie who spoke like a prince and was as well-groomed as a movie star? I’m not talking about one who dabbles with a bad habit, but one who is a complete slave to it. A vamp’s whole life is directed toward getting that next fix of blood—manners are not important. Vamps no more wear puffy, ruffled poet’s shirts, speak with British accents, or use fancy erudite words than would a homeless addict living under a bridge.
Thirdly, you can kill a vampire.
A stake through the heart or a silver bullet is going to hurt a vamp, but neither will kill it. However, doing those things to a vampire will likely guarantee that the enraged blood freak will not sleep or rest until he can return the painful favor to you.
Likewise, sunlight is only going to annoy a creature who has been prowling all night and is probably hung-over. No different than a human who has been out all night partying. Despite the myth, there is no logical way for the sun to make a vamp burst into flames.
The reason why vamps are hard to kill is they can heal. Beyond anything humans have ever seen, vamps can heal from nearly any wound.
While making us horribly sick for a short while, disease and infections are eradicated by our super-driven immune system. There is no single disease ever known to kill a vampire. I think the demands of our hyperactive immune systems and healing abilities are what drive us to drink fresh blood to sustain them. These processes are exhausting on the body, and require unnatural fuel to keep them going. No one knows if it’s why we crave blood, but it makes sense to me.
A vampire can be killed if the healing factor is cut off. Burning a vamp won’t kill him, although it would be excruciating. We seem to feel pain as much as humans, but it doesn’t kill us. However, burning a vampire to nothing but ashes will terminate him forever.
There is a legend, centuries old, of a vamp being reborn after his head was cut clean off. The story claims the head was placed back on the body for burial, and while in the ground, it slowly came back to life, clawed its way out of its coffin, and attacked the townspeople with relentless hatred. No one is old enough to have witnessed it to prove it’s true, but most believe if the head had been destroyed, there would have been no chance at recovery.
Basically, if blood is left around the injury, it will heal. Drain or burn up the blood, and you’ve drained the vamp’s life.
In the case of beheading, it seems to me that without a head there is nothing to control the healed body, and it will eventually die.
No one I know has seen a beheading, at least not a vampire beheading. We’ve learned to only expose ourselves to unreliable witnesses. That’s why we cling to places like New Orleans and its lively Quarter. No one believes the testimony of someone who drinks themselves into a stupor and then claims the next day to have encountered a vampire. Most times they don’t even believe their own memory of it, blaming the alcohol or whatever else they consumed the night before.
We stick to the clubs and bars. There are artsy neighborhoods with bohemian residents who would also make easy prey and are not likely to be noticed by many if they go missing. But their dislike of regular baths makes them quite untasty targets. And their particular mix of unwashed stink and patchouli is highly unpleasant to our heightened senses. However, the polished party people are usually clean, de
lightfully hot from dancing, and easily willing to be lured away by an attractive vamp.
Speaking of the desirables, the sounds of their partying reach my eardrums, and my body rages.
I step outside the bar, walking toward the sounds of the revelry, and the night air rushes into me, awakening feelings that I’ve kept buried for so long. The wind breezes over my body, lifting my black hair off my shoulders. I’d swear the wind hasn’t blown like this in half a century, but I know I just chose not to feel it, thinking it was wrong for me to enjoy it without her. Now the wind feels charged, tickling my bare arms, as if the earth were sending all of its energy right here, right now for something important to begin.
The sky seems as electric as I feel—the moon a lit reminder of the unchained wildness of the evening. Some deem the moonlight to be romantic, but this city of masks, drinks, and desires has no idea what infection is now spreading through its veins.
Chapter II
Regarding Wallflowers
Light breaks through the openings in the tall bell tower, entering my tired eyes and falling flat on my tired mind, taunting me that I should feel something. Been so long since I felt anything.
As I sit in the grass in the middle of the quad on such a magnificent day, I know I should be feeling some sensation.
Class ends, and people pour in and out of old, imposing, brick buildings, each with a different emotion on their face. Horrified at the test they just failed, relieved with being dismissed for the day, elated with having learned something new. Some of them from out of town smiling at the quaintness of catching the streetcar down St. Charles to Carrolton to get some lunch.
I’m not a jaded hometown girl, but definitely a dulled one. The boys around here drink too much, spend too much time making their hair seem perfectly unbrushed, and too much money on I-listen-to-Dave-Matthews-so-I-must-be-hip sandals. Don’t get me wrong—there’s nothing wrong with any of that, and it seems every other girl here goes gaga over it. I’ve even tried it for myself, and all it’s done is leave me sitting in the hot late summer grass feeling as out of place as the church bell tower on this college campus dominated by vocal atheists.
Maybe I was just meant to exist in a century past, when the tower was in its prime and courtship was not embedded in superfluous social games played by 20-somethings having a second teenage decade with adult privileges.
But, they all seem happy…
Am I that much of a mutant that I can’t be what they are, or have they never paused long enough to stroll through the same lonely, pensive hallways as me? Can’t say I’d wish it upon any of them. Let them be happy.
Even my name—Ruby—doesn’t fit me with my brown hair that doesn’t resemble any gem I’ve ever seen.
People walk in many directions all around me—cutting across the grass to get to their next class, walking along the paved sidewalk in front of me, or wandering around looking for a nice place to sit.
A girl approaches wearing a shirt that reads “No Fur” while holding a mobile phone wrapped in a leather case. A boy passes me with the chain from his wallet jingling at his knees, wearing a shirt that says “Independent”—just like 15 other guys on the quad right now who all apparently share the same closet. A group of boys form a hacky sack circle just to the left of me.
All of them seem to shine in the sunlight and move around me in a dance I don’t know. I feel like a black hole in a sky full of identical stars.
Here comes something different. ‘80s-style sunglasses that consist of one thin blade covering her eyes—making her look like a machine; nose ring; black and white striped stockings in 91-degree, sticky, New Orleans weather with a blue Pippy-Longstockings-style ponytail on both sides of her head. Amidst the blue hair are traces of red highlights, more like streaks.
That’s my crazy friend, Ambrosia. I’d call her eccentric, but she works very hard to get people to call her crazy. In fact, she already has people calling her Ambrosia when the name on her official schedule is Amber.
“What’s up, chica?” she asks as she plops down on the grass beside me.
It’s so hard for me to talk to her with her sunglasses on—makes me feel like I’m talking to the shades and not her.
“Just hanging out. Still have about an hour before I need to be at Riverview High.”
“What are we doing tonight?” she quickly asks another question, although I’m not sure she listened to my answer to the first one.
“I wasn’t planning on anything. Maybe a movie.”
“B-o-r-ing.”
“Hey, I’m just not a party girl. Not everybody has to Wang Chung tonight to have a good time.”
Lifting up her sunglasses to reveal her yellow color contacts on bloodshot eyes, “Everybody needs to Wang Chung to have a good time.”
I can’t keep from cracking a smile.
“Come on, Ruby, you have to go out—it’s your 19th birthday for Pete’s sake. What else are you gonna do—sit in the grass alone getting all philosophical-like?”
Laughing nervously, I say, “Yeah right, I’m not that big of a loser yet.”
The truth stings a little more when it comes from your own lips. Self-realization may be healthy, but sometimes it sucks.
Ambrosia smiles wickedly, and I know she’s brewing some mayhem for tonight that’ll make me wish I was at home clinging to my lonely nerdom. Dropping her blade-sunglasses back over her eyes, she says, “Then, ‘80s Night it is.”
“Oh, Lord.”
Chapter III
Descent From Decency
“Come on, keep up!” are the words she leaves trailing over her shoulder to me as she plunges into the hive.
Weaving between shoulders and hands grasping plastic cups that drip alcohol, I follow my blue-haired friend into the center of the vortex.
She moves and bops from one side to the other with the smack of the snare drum that so defines ‘80s music. She effortlessly becomes a part of the crowd like a drop of water added to a pool. I feel like a rock clumsily plunked in, making an unwanted wake.
Thank God—she reaches the exact epicenter of the dancing, turns, and extends her hands out for me to join her, giving me some visible reason for being out here on the dance floor with the graceful and the cool.
The song ends, and I nervously hold my breath, waiting to hear what’s coming next that I’m supposed to dance to. The sound of a keyboard playing the intro to “I Just Died in Your Arms Tonight” brings out a cheer from the crowd and raises hands in the air. I love the song, but I’m petrified, cold fear spreading through my body.
Ambrosia spins herself around, spattering the people around her with tiny droplets of her colorful drink. I sip my Coke, stalling having to dance for another moment. Surprisingly, no one minds that she’s sprinkled them—they all smile at her like she’s ‘80s Girl, saving them from the evil clutches of an ordinary night and dousing them with her magical ‘80s juice, sharing her supernatural cool with them.
She turns her bright, yellow eyes away from her admirers to glance at me quickly.
Swiftly grabbing my free arm at the wrist, she yanks me forcefully toward her, causing a tiny bit of my Coke to run down my other hand. She pulls my wrist back and forth, forcing my body to move with the rhythm of the song.
This is why Ambrosia is a wonderful friend. She’s forgotten to meet me places when we’ve made plans—dated guys I thought I liked, but she wouldn’t let me stay home on my birthday and now won’t let me drown of humiliation in this pool of coolness. She’s going to hold my wrist until I learn to swim—or at least tread water.
Lets go of my hand…body keeps moving…still breathing.
Two drinks plop down on the bar in front of me. I’ve switched from Coke to the hard stuff—energy drinks. The other cup is full of Ambrosia’s too-sweet-smelling, bright-colored concoction she’s been downing all night.
She keeps begging me to try her drink like it’s some all-powerful elixir that’ll wash all the dorkiness inside me right out of my bladder.
That’s just not me—I’m a sober gal. Can’t let go of control of myself—barely have a decent grip as it is. Besides, if I drank like Ambrosia, I’d only be an epically bad, clumsy version of her.
A chiseled arm in a tight-fitting metal-gray t-shirt rests its elbow down on the bar next to my drinks, followed by the most arousing male scent to ever tickle my nostrils. Two female bartenders smile and wave as soon as they notice him. He waves in one fast, straight motion. One of the bartenders blows him a kiss; the other makes a jealous face at her.
A hand lands on my back just as the last note of “Space Age Love Song” rings out the speakers.
Ambrosia must have known the song so well that she started walking to come get me with just enough time before the next song started.
Thinking of taut muscle wrapped in thin, gray, short sleeves, I say to her, “Hang on, I think I might get something else.”
When I return my focus to masculine beauty, I see long, red-tipped female interlopers running down the back of his shirt and up to his shoulders.
Interrupting my dislike of the long-nailed intrusion on my hunk is the beginning of “99 Red Balloons” and an excited Ambrosia voice shouting, “No! Go! Now-now-now!”
She pulls me behind her into the fray, clearing us a path with her hips. You wouldn’t think hips as average as hers could part the sea of inebriated dancers, but she puts a lot of energy behind their swaying.
Once we’ve reached a spot she deems acceptable, she raises her free hand straight up in the air and begins twisting her body to and fro.
I start dancing without any worry. Once the first few songs were over, I relaxed and have actually been having a pretty great time.