Birth of the Vampire (The Vanderlind Realm)

by Twist, Gayla

  It was Dorian. I guess he was who I should have expected. He was holding the bag boy in his arms so the guy wouldn’t collapse to the ground. He glared at me with his flashing gray eyes and snarled. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but then realized I had no idea what I was doing.

  Chapter 25

  Dorian

  Haley was a stupid, stupid girl. She was absolutely going to get herself staked. There was no doubt in my mind. And if she wasn’t willing to listen to me, then there was nothing I could do about it.

  After the police car arrived at her home, I decided to fly back to the castle. I wanted to celebrate at least part of the holiday with my family. I was sure they had already exchanged presents and wished each other happy Christmas, but it wasn’t so late in the night that I couldn’t join in for at least part of the festivities.

  But my conscience kept nagging me. I still remembered quite clearly what it was like to be transformed. The first few days and weeks were filled with excruciating hunger. And I’d had a ready supply of blood at my beck and call. I could only imagine what I would have done if I’d been left to my own devices. So I reluctantly changed course to head back to Haley’s house. The least I could do was stay vigilant outside of the home to make sure she didn’t kill anyone besides possibly her half-uncle and the police.

  But when I returned, the police car was gone. There was some movement in the house and the sound of a male voice cursing, so I assumed that Uncle Kevin was still among the living. I climbed the steps to the porch and rang the bell.

  After quite a long delay, the door cracked open, and Uncle Kevin peeped out at me. I could see that he was icing his right hand. I wondered if his half-niece was the one who had caused him injury. “What the hell do you want?” he snarled.

  “I’m looking for Haley Scott,” I informed him. “Would you please tell me if she’s at home?”

  “She went out,” he said before shoving the door closed and turning the lock.

  “Great,” I mumbled to the closed door. There was a newly born vampire unleashed on the streets of Tiburon.

  I had one small stroke of luck, which was Haley obviously hadn’t realized that she could fly. I focused myself and found her scent trail leading away from the house. If she had been flying, then I would have had no chance of tracking her at all. I started a light jog, following her scent as she wound her way through the streets. She obviously gave no thought to discretion, her scent leading me right through the center of town.

  I was relieved that her footsteps hadn’t taken her to anyone’s home but surprised at how much ground she was covering. I had no idea where she was going until I came upon an all-night grocery store.

  I felt a flash of pride that my offspring had the self-control to seek out uncooked meat rather than slaughter whomever she happened across in the street. That moment of pride was quickly snuffed when I found my scion behind the grocery store tearing into a man’s neck.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I shouted, flinging her off of him. A large section of the man’s throat was torn away, and he was wilting to the ground. “Here,” I said to the man, quickly opening my wrist and forcing some blood into his mouth. I didn’t give him much, just enough so that he would survive. I wasn’t looking to take any more of the undead under my wing.

  After a few swallows, the man look a little less pale. “Listen to me,” I said, hanging onto the man’s coat and staring deeply into his eyes so that he could focus only on me. “What are you doing back behind this store so late at night?”

  “I work here,” he mumbled, his heartbeat stronger than a few moments earlier. “I’m on my break and came back for a smoke.”

  “He’s lying,” Haley growled. “He’s the bag boy. He followed me back here to try to force himself on me.”

  “Quiet,” I said to her. She may have been telling the truth, but I was trying to construct a story for the man. I needed to know what he was willing to believe was the truth. “Listen,” I said, lifting the man up a little higher so I could really connect with him. “You came back here on your break to have a smoke. There was a dog lurking back here, sniffing around the dumpsters. It growled at you, and when you turned to walk away, it lunged for your neck. You fought it off, but you don’t know where it went.”

  “Yes, a dog,” the man repeated, his eyes locked on mine.

  I grabbed his hand and pressed it to his neck. “You are going to go back into the store and have a coworker call an ambulance. You need medical treatment.” The man nodded, transfixed. I took a moment to look the guy over. He was in his early thirties. He had the facial hair of a much younger man. He was starting to look silly. I could smell marijuana smoke on him. He was obviously a man who needed a little motivation in life.

  “After you have recovered from your wounds, you are going to give up doing drugs,” I told him. “No more smoking pot. No more excessive drinking. You are going to feel compelled to go back to school.”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding. “I do need to go back to school.”

  “From now on, you are going to be a hard worker,” I told him. “If a floor needs mopping, you are going to mop it. You are going to take on new responsibilities. You are going to make opportunities for yourself by your own initiative. Got that?”

  The man nodded again.

  “Now, go,” I said, making sure he was steady on his feet and able to walk back into the store. “You need to grow up and quit wasting your life.”

  “I will,’ the man said as he headed around the corner of the building on wobbly legs. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” I called after him. I figured it was the least I could do for him after allowing my progeny to shred his throat.

  Speaking of progeny, I was going to have to force my wayward girl to listen to me. She couldn’t keep running around the streets plunging her fangs into citizens whenever the urge struck her. I realized I was going to have to be much stricter with my scion, and the first step was forcing her to realize she was a member of the undead.

  But Haley was gone.

  Chapter 26

  Sheila

  Haley Scott was dead. It was kind of scary to think about somebody young not being alive anymore. She spazzed out at Blossom’s party and drove off. Christmas morning they found her car wrapped around a tree. My mom told me first thing, before we’d opened our presents or anything. She got all weepy and kept hugging me and saying things like, “You could have so easily been in that car.” As if I would have gone anywhere in a car with Haley Scott. But the fact that she was dead kind of ruined Christmas.

  The creepiest thing was that no one found Haley’s body. They knew she went through the windshield, and there was some blood around the base of the tree that she slammed into, but no Haley. My little brother was convinced she’d been dragged off by wolves or something, but the police thought that maybe she’d gotten turned around and headed toward the woods instead of toward the road to signal for help. I guess the cops searched the area but didn’t find anything. They asked for volunteers to do a more intense search in the afternoon. For whatever reason, my dad thought volunteering was a good idea, and he spent half the afternoon wandering around the woods. So typical of Haley to throw a wet blanket over everyone’s holiday. And they still didn’t find her. It got really cold last night, so the cops were pretty confident she didn’t make it. But it was still kind of weird that they couldn’t find her body.

  I can’t believe Tommy slept with her. I mean, talk about slumming it. And she actually expected that they were going to be together after that. How pathetic. It really almost made me not want to go to Winter Formal with Tommy. But it really was too late to find another date.

  I called Tommy to wish him a Merry Christmas, and he was acting all bummed out about Haley. It was just because she was dead. When she was alive, he was having a great time showing the blood on the backseat of his mom’s car and telling everyone it wa
s from devirginizing her. But suddenly, Tommy was acting like Haley was something special and that he actually cared about her. It was probably just guilt or something. He’d get over it. But I knew that when we got back to school, there was going to be an assembly about her death. And a moment of silence. And maybe even some kind of memorial for Haley. Girls would fake cry, and guys would talk about how hot she was—or whatever guys talked about. She’d probably get a special page in the yearbook, even though she’d only been at Tiburon for a couple of months. Being dead was going to make Haley a lot more popular.

  Chapter 27

  Haley

  I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to go insane. It was something that I had probably thought about a lot more than the average person, given my family history. It wasn’t something I could ask my mom about. I couldn’t just say, “Hey, Mom, so what’s it feel like to go nuts?” I’m not even sure she knew she was crazy. Not really. Sometimes she understood that she had problems, and sometimes she just thought the world was out to get her. I used to be so angry with her when I was little. I didn’t understand that she couldn’t help it. There was something wrong with the chemicals in her brain, and that’s why she was so irrational so much of the time. At least that’s what the doctors all said. Medication helped some of the time, but then she would start acting nutty again, and they’d have to adjust what she was taking. Or she would decide that the doctors and nurses were trying to control her, so she would stop taking what she was supposed to be taking and just let her crazy brain run free. I spent so much of my life hating her for that. But within the last twenty-four hours, I had learned to be a lot more empathetic to what my mother had been going through.

  I did not want to be crazy. But I’d attacked a man and tried to rip out his throat with my bare teeth. There was no denying a diagnosis of total nut job on that behavior. And his blood had tasted so good. I think that was the part that freaked me out the most. Not that I’d actually attacked a man, but that I wanted to do it again.

  I rushed through the streets and down the roads, no longer enjoying the night. All I wanted to do was go home and pull the covers over my head. Maybe in the morning everything would make sense. Maybe I was just trapped in some kind of very realistic dream.

  How the hell did Dorian find me? Was he stalking me or something? That was the only explanation I could think of that made any sense. It would be just my luck that one of the hottest guys I’d ever seen was actually a creepy stalker who liked to sleep in a shallow grave. As if the damn world wasn’t weird enough.

  And how had Dorian controlled the bag boy from the grocery store so easily. One minute the guy is dying in my arms, and the next minute he’s staggering back to the store and thanking Dorian for giving him life advice. Dorian was such a weird dude. An insanely hot weird dude.

  When I got back to Kevin’s house, all the lights were off, but I had no trouble seeing to let myself in. I wondered if my head injury had done more than just give me night vision. Maybe that was the reason I was acting like such a freak. Could a blow to the head make you a psycho? I decided that if I still felt crazy in the morning, I would head over to the hospital and see if I had a concussion or anything.

  As I walked through the kitchen, I noticed the empty ice trays were in the sink again. I felt a pang of guilt followed quickly by irritation. I shouldn’t have hurt Uncle Kevin. It didn’t matter that he’d hurt me plenty in the past, violence was not the answer. But what was his deal with the ice? Didn’t he realize that if he was going to use more ice in the future he would have to refill the trays? Or maybe he just expected me to do it.

  I wanted to just go to my room, climb into bed, and pull the covers over my head. When I ran from the scene of my attack, I at least brought my bag of meat with me. I wanted to suck on the meat and close my eyes, making the world go away. Instead, I took a moment to fill the ice trays. I resented doing it, but I knew it was the considerate thing to do. Not that Uncle Kevin knew the definition of the word considerate, but I did it anyway.

  Finally lying in bed still fully dressed and with a mouth full of raw meat, I wondered about the time. I wished I had my phone, but I didn’t even think to look for it by the tree or anything where I crashed my car. I knew I had it in my hand when I slammed into the tree, but I had no idea what had happened to it after that. Smashing through the windshield had distracted me from keeping tabs on it.

  I tried to just empty my brain so I could relax. My converted closet of a room was normally pitch black, but my vision had become so good that I could make out every dot on the tiles of the drop ceiling.

  I’d had some pretty lousy Christmases in the last seventeen years, but this one put them all to shame. I’d been humiliated by Tommy, trashed my car, ruined Erika’s sweater, lost my phone, slept in a hole in the ground with the weirdest hottie on the planet, carjacked some guy, chewed on a bunch of raw meat, broken my uncle’s finger, and tried to rip out a guy’s larynx with my teeth. And I hadn’t even had the opportunity to wish anyone a Merry Christmas.

  I must have at some point drifted off because the next thing I knew I was in searing pain. I leapt out of bed, convinced it was on fire. What the hell was going on? I couldn’t see any flames. I frantically smacked at my clothing trying to put out the invisible fire that was burning me all over. Then I thought that maybe my clothes were covered in a chemical or something, so I started ripping them off my body as fast as I could. As I flung Erika’s sweater to the ground, it partially covered the bottom of the door. I had forgotten to slide my bed in front of it when I went to sleep. My pain decreased slightly. It was still excruciating but a little less so.

  I yanked the blanket off the bed and threw it at the foot of the door. My pain dropped to almost nothing even though my skin was smoking to the point that I was worried the smoke detector in the hallway might start blaring.

  “What the hell?” I exclaimed although there was no one in the room to hear me. I’d just experienced one of the most excruciatingly painful things I could imagine, and I had no idea why. I collapsed onto my bed and stuck my head under my pillow.

  I was going crazy. That was the only explanation. I had lost my mind, and now nothing in the world made sense. Or maybe some tanker truck had flipped on the highway spilling toxic waste, and the gas was slowly creeping across Tiburon destroying everything in its path.

  Once my skin stopped smoking and I felt a little braver, I came out from under my pillow and began examining the bottom of my door. I pulled the blanket away from one edge, and my skin immediately began to burn again, so I quickly shoved the blanket back in place. It wasn’t toxic gas or anything else dangerous leaking into the house. It was just plain sunlight. That must have meant it was probably sometime in the late afternoon. There was a window across the hall from my room, and it faced west so the sun was probably going down just enough that it was at the right angle to filter in under my door.

  But why was sunlight suddenly so painful? I’d never had a problem with it before. Then I remembered some of Dorian’s crazy ravings. Hadn’t he said something about avoiding sunlight? Or frying in the sunlight? He had been acting so crazy that I’d focused more on getting away from him than I had on the actual words coming out of his mouth. But he obviously knew something about what was going on, and I sure as hell didn’t.

  I lay back down on my bed and tried to think about what he’d been saying to me. There was the warning about the sun. He’d definitely been right about that. I wasn’t going anywhere near the door until I was sure the sun had set.

  Had he said he was a vampire? That sounded familiar. Was vampire slang for something? Like when some guy says he’s a sex machine. You don’t really think he’s a machine. You think he’s an egomaniac who probably isn’t very good at sex.

  But what did vampire mean? He sucked the life out of you? He was such a jerk that he sapped your soul? That might have been true, but it seemed like an odd thing for a guy to come right out and just admit.

  I found
that I was very tired. It was late afternoon, but I could barely keep my eyes open. It didn’t really matter because I wasn’t scheduled to work until seven, and I didn’t want to go out into the roasting sun anyway. Lying on the bed, I shut my eyes and let my mind go blank.

  Chapter 28

  Dorian

  Even though it was Christmas, I really didn’t want to go back to the castle. I didn’t want to face my family and explain what had happened. It was all just too ridiculous, and Haley would probably be dead by tomorrow night anyway. So I figured I would just return to my favorite crypt in the cemetery to rest and then figure out what to say to my aunt and cousins once I knew the fate of my progeny. That sound like about as good of a plan as any.

  I did feel guilty for not being there on Christmas. My aunt had gone to a lot of trouble to make the night special, but I had the feeling her efforts were more directed at Jessie’s human than for my benefit. Still, I hated being rude. I would have to apologize profusely and perhaps buy her an emerald brooch.

  The tomb suited my purpose just fine, but I did realize that I had spent two nights roughing it there in less than a week. I was growing positively bohemian. As I reclined on the marble slab of some wealthy man who had died right around the time I was being born, I thought about the events of the last twenty-four hours. What had possessed me to turn Haley Scott? Over the last eighty or so years, I had seen plenty of people fall from buildings and drown in sinking riverboats. I had even saved one or two when the opportunity presented itself. But that was only to preserve their mortal lives. I had never once thought of turning a single soul into a vampire.