I Heart Vampires

by Siona McCabre

  “Want a turn?” she asked me, indicating the swing.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Aw, come on. You sure?”

  “Trust me, it’s a lot more fun for me to watch you do it.”

  “Because I’m so awesome at it?” She giggled.

  I smiled as a breeze blew gently by us, carrying the intoxicating scent of her summery fresh hair. I was glad I had gotten better at restraining myself. “Exactly. I could never compete with such perfection,” I said.

  “Fair enough. I am the best after all.” She stood up and we strolled into the night.

  “So what is it you want to do after prom?” I pressed.

  Paige shrugged. “Directly after or in general?”

  “Let’s start with in general.”

  “I don’t know. I thought maybe we could do something special,” she trailed off.

  Really? Was I really hearing this? Paige—the long-sought-after love of my life, girl of my dreams—was telling me she wanted us to do something special on prom night? My heart nearly leaped out of my chest but sunk like lead a moment later when I considered that I could easily be misunderstanding what she’d meant by “something special.” Weren’t we supposed to be just friends? What “special” thing did friends do together after prom? Was she hinting at being open to something more? I was so confused. I felt the need to tread lightly, like a soldier in a minefield. I cleared my throat and tried to clear my mind.

  “What do you mean, ‘something special’?” I asked as casually as I could. I didn’t want to look directly at her for fear that she’d see the hopeful expectation burning in my eyes like a fire red brand.

  She shrugged again. “I don’t know, I was thinking we didn’t have to stay at prom the whole time. Maybe we could go do something, just us.”

  “Um, okay.” I was blowing my cover. Stay cool, Noah! I peeked at her out of the corner of my eye and found that she was already scrutinizing my visibly uncomfortable expression.

  She looked one part confused and two parts amused. Busted. A curious smile crossed her face. “Were you thinking I wanted to sleep with you on prom night?” she asked bluntly.

  Had there not been black sludge running through my veins, I definitely would have turned cherry red. “Nuh—no. What?” I stuttered.

  “You were thinking I wanted to sleep with you on prom night, right?” she asked again in a neutral tone.

  “Um, no?”

  She stepped in front of me and we stopped. She held both my hands in hers. “Noah. Do think I’m the kind of girl who wants to lose her v-card on prom night?”

  It seemed like an easy enough question, and I was about to answer, “No, of course not,” but then I second-guessed myself.

  “No,” I finally said.

  There was a pause. A really long pause.

  Finally, she broke into a shy smile. “Exactly.”

  Victory!

  “I mean, don’t get me wrong. Someday I’d like to…you know…”

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, of course, someday.” She glanced my way, testing the waters.

  We walked along a few more paces in silence. I caught her looking at me out of the corner of my eye, her expression so soft and alluring in the moonlight. This whole thing was driving me mad. “Paige, why are we talking about this? Virginity. Prom night. All of this. I’m really confused. I’m doing my best to be friends with you when you know I don’t want it to stop there.”

  “Noah,” she started.

  “And then at the movies you wanted to hold hands, but then you keep insisting that nothing can happen right now.”

  “Noah,” she tried again.

  It was spilling out of me now, I didn’t know how to stop. “And then tonight you’re looking so amazing I can’t stand it, and I’m pretty sure you’re flirting with me, so I’m completely lost and—”

  “NOAH.”

  That finally stopped me. I sighed. “I’m sorry. I really want you and I can’t have you and it makes me crazy.”

  She bit her lip, her eyes glued to the ground. “No, I’m sorry. You’re right, I’ve been so back-and-forth. And that’s not fair. The truth of the matter is I really like you. A lot. And that terrifies me.”

  “I know,” I offered softly.

  “To be fair, Noah, you don’t. Harold was…well, he wasn’t the best guy but I put so much time and effort, so much of myself into him I ended up lost and broken when he left me. He broke up with me. Even though he was the one who was cheating.”

  I didn’t know what to say, other than I still felt like punching him in the face.

  “But anyhow, the fact that he dumped me is not the point. The point is that I’m still trying to figure out who exactly I am and how to be someone that I can live with. That I actually like.”

  That made two of us.

  “And I think I need to be alone to do that, but then there’s you, and I have these strong feelings for you. I can’t deny them. But then you’re hot-and-cold sometimes too. I’m sure you have your own stuff you’re going through, I get it, but I can’t handle more heartbreak right now. I’m not strong enough for that. I’m sorry I confused you, I really am. It’s because I can’t figure out what to do with all of this. If you can handle it, I need you to be patient with me.”

  I stepped in close to her and laced my fingers through hers.

  Her eyes were glistening with the hint of tears, but she quickly blinked them away.

  “I can wait for you.” I’d already waited seven years. I supposed I could wait a few more weeks.

  She smiled at me, a smile so fragile it broke my heart. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Not wishing to linger any longer in that painful in-between, Paige cleared her throat and cracked a silly joke. We meandered through the park, hand in hand.

  “So, let’s find something fun to do after prom.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, “something fun.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “Not a clue.”

  We both chuckled. The rest of the walk home was spent in contented silence, fingers intertwined.

  I walked Paige to her house, and headed home. When I got close to to my house, I checked my voice mails—one from Malcolm asking about a certain math homework problem and if I’d seen this hilarious hippo YouTube video; the other from Mom, letting me know she was working late again. I didn’t mind. In fact, I felt like taking in more of the night air, the same night air that saw a breakthrough for Paige and me. Finally, we were getting somewhere. Maybe it wasn’t exactly where I wanted to get, not yet, but our conversation gave me hope.

  Hope was the only thing keeping me from plunging into a pit of everlasting despair. The hope that Paige and I would be together. The hope that Malcolm and my friendship would survive the hardships of my “condition.” The hope that I could lead some form of a regular life. Was that too much to ask?

  I was strolling through the dark, misty woods, pondering these things, when she appeared.

  I stopped dead in my tracks.

  Her skin was luminescent and her brilliant golden hair was pulled back in a tight bun. An intricate blue-green tattoo snaked its way around her entire arm. She was just standing there, twenty feet from me, staring.

  I was dumbstruck.

  “What are you looking at?”Brilliant. You’ve been waiting for this girl to show herself, and that’s your first question?

  “You,” she replied calmly. “Who are you?”

  “I am your maker.”

  Chapter 16

  My mind was racing with so many thoughts I didn’t know where to start. She saw this, and started the conversation for me.

  “My name is Haley.”

  “Haley,” I repeated.

  She giggled. It was the very same giggle I’d heard in the woods while I was waiting for Malcolm.

  “DOUBLEHELIX1178,” I stated. Apparently I could only handle stating obvious facts, my brain still reeling from the shock of her sudden appearance.

  “In the
flesh,” she smiled. Her razor-sharp fangs glinted in the moonlight. She was strikingly beautiful, positive unearthly. It was mesmerizing.

  I tried to get a hold of myself. “Are you a thousand, one hundred, and seventy-eight years old?”

  “It’s rude to ask a woman her true age,” she chastised lightly, “but yes. That’s how long I’ve been this way.”

  Suddenly I started to feel the gravity in my body, the weight of my feet, my limbs. My senses started to sharpen again, and the torrent of emotions I’d been suppressing this whole time came rushing to the foreground. The biggest one, of course, being anger. “Why? Why did you do this to me? Who do you think you are? What gives you the right to take away MY LIFE?”

  She walked toward me. Slowly. “Calm down, Noah. I know you’re upset.”

  “Upset? Are you KIDDING ME? Upset doesn’t even begin to—”

  Her hands reached out and rested themselves on my shoulders. She looked me in the eye. “Shhh…one thing at a time.”

  I was conflicted. Here was a stunning girl who was gently trying to explain something to me that I desperately wanted to know, but she also happened to be the monster that had destroyed my life, as I’d once known it. My curiosity won out. I stopped.

  “It might be easier if I start from the beginning,” Haley said.

  “I’m listening,” I said coldly.

  “I’m going to give you the short version. My name was Halla. I was born in eight fifteen A.D. in what is now Norway. I was a slave.”

  “That ritual…” I started.

  “I’m getting there. I had a somewhat difficult life, you might say, made more painful by the fact that by the time I was fifteen, I was madly in love with my lord. But of course, I could never have him. When he died three years later, I saw my opportunity to be with him forever. If I were to voluntarily burn myself on his funeral pyre, I would be his wife for all eternity.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was turned the night before his funeral.”

  “Not to be graphic, but couldn’t you still have burned yourself?”

  She smiled sadly to herself.

  “I see you haven’t played with fire yet. I tried. I wouldn’t burn. My skin remained hard and cold. The people saw this and chased me out of my village.”

  “So you’ve been on your own for over an eon?”

  My future was looking dimmer by the second.

  “Not per se. I’ve been a vampire for over an eon. But I quickly found that I wasn’t alone. Neither are you. None of us is. There are so many more of us than you even know.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m part of a clan, Noah.”

  “A clan? Like a coven or something?”

  “It’s more like an extracurricular club. For the damned. Harmless, really.”

  I had so many questions. And I didn’t know how long she’d stick around for, so I asked. “The butterfly thing. What is that about?”

  “A gift, essentially. I passed it down to you as it was passed on to me. Most vampires have the ability to shape-shift, but what they shift into is specific to their lineage. My maker was Slavic. Slavic vampires shift into butterflies. Some turn into snakes, others into cats, and so on. You’ll learn to control it in time.

  A pause. The biggest question. The one I was afraid to ask.

  “Can I ever go back?” I asked quietly. Please say yes, please say yes, please say yes.

  “No.”

  I immediately felt my face twisting in despair and tears racing down my cheek. I clutched at my face with my cold hands and tried to choke down the sob I knew was rising.

  “Oh, Noah, it’s okay. Really.”

  “It’s not! It’s really not!” Doubled over, I felt as though my heart would rip itself right out of my chest. I gripped at my head, which I thought would explode at any second. She just watched, waited. When I finally drew air back into my lungs, I wheeled around.

  “WHY?” I roared.

  “Because it’s your destiny,” she responded, matter-of-factly.

  “No! That doesn’t mean anything! That’s such a cop-out!”

  “Call it what you will, you were meant to be a vampire.”

  “I was NOT! I had a life!”

  She cocked her head to the side. “Oh, Noah, what makes you think it was much of a life?”

  “What? How dare you!”

  “Think about it, Noah. Were you ever very strong? Exceptionally smart? Perceptive? Did you excel at anything?”

  “That’s not the point!”

  “But it is. Whether you like it or not, every one of us has a certain level of potential that we’re supposed to—no, that we have to meet. Most people reach their potential during their sad, short little lives. You’re different. In order to unlock your true potential—which is so much greater than you can imagine right now—this is what you had to become. You didn’t have a choice, Noah. You never did.”

  “I wish I did.”

  “Trust me, you didn’t.”

  “And what if you could go back and die with your lord like you had wanted?”

  “If I had gotten what I’d wanted, I never would have fulfilled my potential. I would have been just another unremarkable slave girl, quickly forgotten.”

  I just stood there, shaking my head. This was all too much to take in, and my body was still a raging mess of emotion.

  “You remind me of your father,” she said.

  “Wait, what?” Had I heard her right? “You know my father? What do you know about him?”

  “In time. There’s plenty of it.” With that, she morphed before my eyes into a brilliant blue-green butterfly and was swept up by the breeze, carried away into the depths of the night.

  Chapter 17

  I didn’t know how it could have come to this. I thought back to the bad things I’d done in my pre-vampire life, and yet I still couldn’t bring myself to process what I’d just witnessed…. What did it all mean? I began gasping for air. I felt as though my lungs were filling with tiny lead pebbles. There was an anvil on my chest and a deadening in my heart. Something had been forcibly ripped from me. Something I didn’t think I had anymore. I let my chest sink, and this time I didn’t fight for the next breath.

  ****

  After my long, eye-opening night, first with Paige, then with Haley, I was wrecked. I wasn’t entirely sure just what had happened. I barely had enough strength to get myself upstairs to my room. Once there, I collapsed on my bed.

  Everything seemed foggy—a strange and distant dream. The room was swirling. I tried to focus on concrete moments. Paige and I had held hands. My maker finally had showed herself. Haley. She knew something about my dad. I couldn’t go back to the way I had been.

  That was all I could manage. I felt weak, drained. I suddenly realized it had been awhile since I’d fed. Although it wasn’t the first thing on my mind, I didn’t want to spend much longer in this depressing haze. I pulled the remaining blood bags from my mini-fridge. There were three pouches of rich, red blood. I knew that two of them were from the same source, because I had already sampled from each of them.

  Bag two had transported me into the mind of a middle-aged kindergarten teacher, eating a TV dinner and watching Glee. I’d had a second experience with the ever-so-suave Evan (bag three). He and his girlfriend stayed broken up, obviously. Bag four was from the same kindergarten teacher. At that time, she had been in the middle of a hectic toddler-filled day. Then, with bag five, I had spent a very grimy and uncomfortable stretch of time on the outskirts of town, as I inhabited the repulsive body of an overweight car salesman. Lucky me. So I had three bags left. I knew one of them belonged to the same salesman, and two belonged to a mystery donor. I picked the middle one and set the other two back in the fridge.

  I palmed the unassuming bag and settled myself onto the bed, ready to recharge. I said a brief, minor prayer to no one in particular asking that this next voyeuristic vision be an amusing one or, at the very least, not exhausting.
I was not prepared for what I was about to see. No one would have been.

  “Bottoms up.”

  The liquid felt warm and gooey sliding down my throat. It sent a tingle through my spine that gave me a spasm. My limbs felt as though they were waking from an ancient sleep, hot and tense. My eyes fluttered, and before I knew it, the sensation had reached my head and I was transported.

  I was in a darkroom. Not simply room devoid of light, but an actual darkroom, as in old-school photography. A dim red bulb illuminated a room the size of a walk-in closet, claustrophobic though nearly bare. There were a couple containers of clear liquid bathed in the unsettling crimson light. On one such bath I (whoever “I” was) was focused entirely. In the solution lay a blank sheet of photo paper, drifting and bobbing like a rowboat at sea.

  A pair of gloved, masculine hands entered my view. In the right hand I held tweezers, with which I gently moved and submerged the photo in the solution. Slowly but surely, the faintest of gray stains began to appear, converging and darkening into the skeleton of a photograph. Before long, the image came to fruition in the dank light of the mystery room. At first I couldn’t quite make out the patterns of black and white, seeing them distorted like a runny Rorschach test. Moments later, when I put it together in my head, I did a double take. From within the basin, just below the liquid’s surface, the bruised and bloodied face of Brandie Masterson stared back at me.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  Powerless to do anything at all, I watched as the hands lifted Brandie’s horrifying visage from the basin, rinsed the photo, shook it out, and clipped it on a thin line of wire to dry. To the left of this latest photo dangled a string of other pictures:

  Brandie leaving her apartment.

  Brandie at a convenience store.

  Brandie entering her apartment.

  Brandie crossing the street.

  Brandie smoking on the street outside her apartment at night.

  Brandie tied to a chair, mouth duct-taped.

  Brandie sleeping on a filthy floor, bound and gagged.