by Amy Mah
“Where is the RING?!”
Amy really wanted to say something along the lines of, “Err… you mean the one that cannot be removed?” But she knew that she should not push her luck, or his other eye would also start to twitch as if he were practicing for a blinking contest.
Instead, she sweetly replied, “I’m wearing it, of course, Uncle.”
To be extra sweet, she always added his honorific title of “uncle”; this was for several reasons. The first was an absolute refusal on her part to call him “lord” or “master,” and the second was to gently hint that she thought he was old, and if he insisted on ordering her about, then she expected presents.
Her answer was true; she was wearing it. The ring was now around her neck attached to a cord. She pulled it out from under her shirt to show him.
Magic rings that cannot be removed by the wearer were not designed for teenage vampire girls in a strop, and Amy had mastered a full teenage strop as soon as she had turned 13. The damn thing had been vibrating the entire night before and driving her mad, so after covering her hand with washing liquid, she jammed the ring along with her finger in the door and used both feet and a lot of vampire strength to rip the magic ring along with a large chunk of skin from her finger. It was a painful strop, but it needed to know Amy was not some hobbit.
“Be a good girl and put it back on, and we won’t say any more about it,”
He was now working on the edge of shouting in a condescending adult form of conversation. Amy wondered why he thought that that was going to do him any good?
She put her hands on her hips and answered, “NO!”
Amy watched as his fangs slowly forced themselves out unbidden from between tight lips. She had to admit that they were very impressive and all, but over the past few weeks Amy had gotten used to them. Besides, deep down inside, her inner vamp informed Amy that it was only for show and that he would not hurt her.
To prove it, he lost his cool and shouted, “WHY THE HELL NOT?!”
“No, No, No! It’s perverted, and if you do not know why, then go read a book. And at the same time, buy a bloody phone, as I’m not going to be sitting on this dirty roof come winter; it’s just stupid! Don’t you own a castle with log fires and physically disadvantaged servants that say, “yes, master,” with a lisp? Why the hell do we have to meet on a roof in the first place? We are supposed to be at the top of the food chain: vampires, not bloody stupid birds!”
“I am in a living hell where a girl can suffer death in a thousand ways, and it is called high school. I am not, I REPEAT, not going to be known at school as the girl who wears a ring to make her fingers vibrate!! Don’t you understand? It’s so well camouflaged that people will not see it as a pager but as a ring that vibrates. Look up vibrating rings on the net! They sell them in plain wrapping, and you never wear them out. It’s rude, and that’s it: end of convo. I quit! Go get yourself another pet! Try a snake next time; it can wear the ring as a vibrating collar, and you can sell it on eBay as a sex toy!”
With a regular diet of blood from the vampire blood bank that the vampire pets had showed Amy how to use, her body was feeling better than it ever had. With a single move, she snapped the cord from around her neck and flung the ring at him. Okay, okay; she knew it was not the same as punching a hole in a door with vampire strength, but that only happens in the movies.
As the ring made its way through the air towards its target, he moved a hand and plucked it out of the air. He then placed the ring in the top pocket of his waistcoat, sighed and said something that Amy did not hear. This was her chance for a dramatic departure; she turned and ran off without a word. Okay, one or two words came out when she stubbed her toe on a pipe as she ran across the roof. And just what idiot sticks a pipe in the middle of a roof! Huh! Another reason why I hate roofs!
why I hate roof meetings
Phabian (Amy’s master.. hah!)
That was not how meetings with underlings should go; he should not get angry. You do not get angry with underlings! But every time they met, she would be so irritating. She must do it on purpose, like leaving the dead rat last week. She knew he could kill her, but damn it! She was only a female, so therefore she had to respect him.
As the ring made its way through the air towards its target, he moved a hand and plucked it out of the air, and as he watched her leave he placed the ring in the top pocket of his waistcoat, sighed and said to the now empty roof, “That could have gone better.”
It was an understatement at best; how could she cause him so much difficulty? He had lost his temper for the first time in over 100 years. He had lost his temper, and with a female! A female so young that he owned socks twice her age. He could kill her in the blink of an eye, and she knew it. He had given up telling her that fact when she started just giving him the extended, single-word reply of “Sooooooo?”
She did that on purpose just to annoy him; she did everything on purpose just to annoy him! Damn it! He could not kill her, and she somehow knew it, too. She was important to him, and she knew that as well. She was a mystery; she was both an abomination and worth her weight in gold at the same time.
The council, or more importantly, Valerius, agreed she could be studied and could be unique, so he had to keep her alive! She did not even realize how special she was; she was just a female that did not know her place, and he found it harder daily to control her. If she hadn’t been so special, he would have killed her the first night they met. He now often wished he had; difficult females in vampire society did not survive long, and she was off the difficult scale. He had to keep her hidden until she was ready. Her status was also a drawback, and if she discovered her full status, she would have problems. He would have even more problems if others found out what he had discovered when he tasted her blood.
Now that she had given him the ring back, she had lost her camouflage. His reason for summoning her was to warn her about a rogue vampire feeding at her school: not that he would feel any pity for any vampire stupid enough to try and stick fangs into his Hell Cat’s neck. If only she knew it, she was very capable at looking after herself.
But she still thought of herself as human, and that would keep her weak. Males would soon come looking for the rogue and kill it to protect their pets, and when they went looking for the rogue, who would they discover walking around without camouflage? His little Hell Cat.
Phabian
Chapter 5
Stupid Convos and Whatever
Amy know that she should not get involved in the stupid conversations that the pets had, but there she was hanging out with a bunch of black-wearing, Twilight-loving emos every Friday after class, and it is just the pits!
They met up and wanted to talk vampire stuff, and to Amy that meant discussions on how to get bloodstains out of clothing, along with what were the warmest type of undies you can get for rooftop vampire meetings, not where to get the best black nail polish from. The things they said about vampires were just so wrong. Amy wondered what kept them from asking the real vampires, if not during the sex then afterwards. Then the crap about, “Can a vampire turn into a cloud of gas?” would not be on the group discussion list of topics.
Amy ran through a mental checklist of the group, which consisted of both strange and odd sluts-err, sorry, pets: Clary, who never stopped talking; Paige, who never said a word. Lucy-Ann had bright green hair and DayGlo nail polish. Regina had black and white hair and looked like she could murder puppies. She was also the leader and looked far more like a vampire than Amy could have managed (and I had a head start with the fangs and claws).
Paige was okay; well, if you liked mice. Clary was so happy and friendly all the time that she must have been on Prozac. She was so chatty that Amy often wanted to kill her. The only girl she really got along with was Cind, and that was partly do to her extensive range of vampire books, which Amy was slowly reading her way through.
Amy could only take so much, and when someone asked if anyone had ever seen a vampire glow,
she finally lost it with them. All these group-sharing sessions were on how they had all met their wonderful vampire masters and how nice they treated the pets. They even used vamp slang like “raising one’s tail” to mean sex. Crap! Amy knew male vamps were just like any male; they just wanted sex. And these idiots were giving it to them free on a plate and then boasting about it.
“You are all mad! You are just pets! Servants! Sex slaves! You are so pathetic, wanting to have a title of familia, thinking it means you are part of the vampire family. Well, just look it up. Its real meaning is Latin, and try spelling it “f-a-m-u-l-a,” and then you will see what you really are to a vampire! Vampires are not nice; they kill humans to live. Humans are just meat to them, and you think you are something special because you are a pet to blood drinkers? Do you really want to know how I first met my lord and master, he who cannot be named? Well, he snapped the neck of a man that was attacking me, then he knocked me unconscious. When I woke up, I was naked and lying on a roof where my so-called lord and master gave me a ring and informed me that I would do as he said or he would rip my head off! And you want to know how romantic my first day as a pet was?”
As Amy walked away, she could hear one of the girls comment on her outburst.
“Oh, wow! Like, that was so cool! Doing it all naked on top of a roof! I just met mine in a late-night drug store looking for sunblock. With him, it is cheap motel rooms and having to wear handcuffs.”
Once Amy was out of hearing range, she chose a few curse words and wondered if male vampires picked pets by an IQ to match a bust size. She couldn’t believe that the pets thought that vampires were nice and romantic. Don’t make me sick; we are not nice, and we are not romantic. We are just overgrown leaches with an attitude problem, and they are so blind to think we are cool! For God’s sake, just look at me! Do I look cool?
As to her first meeting with her uncle, Amy knew that everything she had said to the pets was all true. She had just left out a few minor details, like the sucking of his fingers. It was only a possibility that she had done more with him than she could remember, and the finger licking, marking her as his, meant she had-no! Nothing! Nothing happened. The bastard was far too conceited. He was a male, and it would have made his day to tell me if anything had happened. He would have gloated over it, so nothing had happened, and that was final. And as soon as my next period comes, it will prove it!
Amy felt the packet she had collected off of Clary at their socalled coven meeting and wondered if the government knew vampires had their own delivery service (okay, well, the delivery service was one elderly man that would bring mail for the vampire pets from their lords and masters, but he did wear a cap). When she got out of view of the pets, Amy pulled at the packing until she remembered that the obvious thing was to use a claw.
There was a box with an envelope attached to it. She removed the envelope and turned the box over in her hands. Looking again at the box, she wondered, What the hell is Uncle up to now? Ripping open the envelope answered her unspoken question. Out slipped the ring and a piece of paper with a single word on it.
From magic rings to magic words, she thought, and she folded the paper and put it in her pocket. The single magic word it contained said: PLEASE. Amy put the ring back on her finger, then after a moment she glared at it. So it was a magic ring. Amy hoped that for its sake, it was also telepathic, because if it wished to still stay ring-shaped then it should know that she was a vampire only pretending to be a pet.
Perhaps it was a bit foolish to stick the stupid thing back on, but what else could she do? He did say please. With a tug, she yanked it back off her finger, looked at it hard again, then replaced it on the finger. Good! It now knew who was boss. Amy’s ring was now a removable non-removable magic ring, and she told herself that if it ever forgot its place in her life as just a finger ornament, then it would envy what happened to the one ring from the Lord of the Rings after she had finished with it.
As soon as she got home, she ran up to her room and threw herself onto the bed, where she tore open the last bit of wrapping covering the box then sat back to take in the shock of what he had given her.
“Wow! Now that’s better than a stupid ring!”
After opening the box and placing all the bits in a line, Amy switched on her laptop to look up its specs. Maybe that was a little rude, but heck! It wasn’t like he was going to find out, and besides, she already knew that it was the best smartphone on the market from the hot phone fact sheet she had seen that was produced by the school’s business club.
It had everything you could possibly want to put you in the “ooh and aah” category when you showed it off in class: very sought after, which meant someone would try and steal it within the week. That made Amy smile; there was a name you called someone who tried to rob a vampire, and that was lunch! k'12
She put her new phone on to fully charge and looked at the small piece of paper that was tucked into the box. It had a phone number on it under a drawing of a bat, so it was message time. A short one was in order while the phone was charging; it did not say much, but it would show that she had forgiven him.
OK & THK U LOV IT XXX AMY
Amy
Chapter 6
Vampire Books (err, no; that should be Books on Vampires)
The book she had borrowed off Cind was useless, yet the group used the darn thing as a self-help vampire guide! As if a pet would ever get turned by a grateful master, Amy thought as she flicked through the section on dangers to vampires. Trash! The entire book was only good for lighting a fire.
It explained in great detail ways to kill a vampire, and well, Amy had to agree that they were probably correct. Removing the head from the body would kill vampires, werewolves and zombies. That method would also work on tax inspectors! How stupid a statement! Cutting the head off anything would kill it!
Amy started making notes from the book and then added comments of her own, first on a scrap of paper. When that was full, she switched on the laptop and started typing:
Section 1b:
Finding and killing a vampire:
No image by mirror or film: Wrong, just how do you think we can put on makeup?
Death by stake: A t-bone? Or are they talking about a lump of sharp wood, in which case the splinters would sure hurt (unless the person is wearing gardening gloves). The old black-and-white movies were more accurate; the vampire lies down on flat surface, and (with gloves) you place a wooden stake point first over the heart of the supine vampire and then hit it hard with a mallet several times, If you are Buffy or Blade and practice everyday, then you can take on a vampire standing up. If not the best, the amateur vampire killer will get a bruised, pissed-off vampire as the wood hits a rib or the like.
Can’t pass running water: I thought this was witches with bladder problems, but then if anyone had normal internal plumbing, then this has to be wrong, and for obvious reasons.
Sunlight can kill a vampire: Well, I’m never going to lie on a beach in a bikini, but so long as I am covered in 100 percent sun block and polarized sunglasses, it’s normally okay. If not, I develop a rash. Acne may make you a social leper, but it’s not terminal like cutting your head off.
Silver bullets: Werewolves, yes, but vampires? Heck, I don’t know, but I’m making a mental note not to find out!
Garlic: Yes, okay, the book was correct with this being dangerous as it gives me gas, so its perhaps more dangerous for anyone standing near me.
Vampires had to sleep on earth: No way was that right! I had tried camping once and only once; it was cold, hard, dirty and full of nasty crawling things and was something I would never try again.
Holy symbols: Now this was just stupid; no way would a cross or such things ever harm me, unless it was big and heavy and someone hit me with it. I once had a necklace with a cross on it, and nothing happened. Being a Buddhist probably helped, though.
Religion: As I said before, I’m Buddhist; does that count? As far as I know, he never said anything
in his teachings about vampires. Besides, what would Buddhist priests be able to do to vampires? Perhaps throw holy oranges and hope they get them stuck in the vampires’ teeth! All the monks I have ever met were nice and friendly to me, and on one holy day I had even helped give out leaflets.
Vampires were sexy: What a load of crap! I sometimes wished I did not have a reflection in the mirror
Amy now added a title to the typed words: FANGS RULE and then stopped.
What is wrong with me? All the books say vampires are sexy and seductive, but this vampire was just hungry. Vampires hunted meat. You could live on cold blood, but it was not the same. A girl could live life without chocolate, but it was not really living: just surviving. And that was what drinking cold blood was like; it was life without chocolate!
Mind you, Amy never wanted to feel the same as she did on the night she first met her so-called master. Just thinking about it still made her feel sick. Well, he is old, like very old: 40 at least. It would be like dating someone’s grandfather; there were names for girls her age that dated old men, and the names were not nice names.
Why couldn’t I have a nice boyfriend like the girls in the vampire novels do? Well, apart from the weird ones in vampire books that glowed and wanted to watch you while you sleep. Yuck!
There were plenty of hot-looking guys at school, but when Amy got close to them, she found herself wondering what they would taste like (or rather, what their blood would taste like), and that did not sound like the best way to start a relationship. As to small talk, the last time a boy showed any interest in her, she always ruined it by asking him what blood type he had, which made him think she wanted to marry him.
Her major worry was not so much losing possible boyfriends but not being interested in them instead, and if it was not for that crazy night on the roof, Amy would have been more concerned that she was turning into a vampire lesbian. All the films indicated that as soon as people became vampires, they craved both blood and lots of girl-on-girl action. The truth was that she didn’t fancy girls. The movies were just as wrong as the books; perhaps female vampires only fancied other female vampires.