by Ramy Vance
Arrgh!
The bell rang and everyone started to pack up and leave. I purposely took my time, hoping Justin Truly would come my way and talk to me. This time I would be more suave. Cool as ice. I’d be the bee’s knees—no, that’s not right. That was human vernacular in the 1920s. This was the new millennium, the GoneGod World. Unfortunately, I had lived through a ton of those eras, each with its own particular and peculiar vernacular—plus, I had a deeeep love for ’80s and ’90s TV—so I wasn’t really hip to modern slang. Yet.
What I did know was that in this era, humans didn’t use words like bee’s knees, groovy or rockin’. And one wasn’t in or down with it anymore.
Modern humans were now saying things like GoneGodDamn! and Empty Heaven. I’d even heard some idiot say Hellelujah! Probably thought he was being clever or something.
That’s what I needed to be—a modern human. Part of being a modern human meant you didn’t wait for Justin to show up. You just happened to be in his path when he did. So, in an effort to be like my contemporaries, I pretended to be engrossed in the class textbook. When he passed, he’d stop and say “Hi,” or maybe something cooler, like “Hey.” I’d lift a casual finger as if to say Give me a minute before looking up as if unaware who had been standing there.
Yeah—that was what a modern human looked like. Calculatedly casual.
Besides, I didn’t need to be too modern, because—not to sound full of myself—I was cute. Not gorgeous, mind you, but cute. I had a kind of Reese-Witherspoon-in-Legally-Blonde or Sarah-Michelle-Gellar-in-Buffy vibe going for me. I had a cute but confident yet somehow helpless aura that I’d cultivated over the centuries of being a vampire.
I had to. It was how I hunted.
During that time, I had two main shticks to lure in my prey. The first one I called Cute and Helpless, and it went like this: “Oh my, Mister Big-and-Strong, it is dark outside and I’m scared. Do you mind walking me home?” That was good when I wanted a quick meal without all the fuss of my prey screaming and running.
The second technique was reserved for when I was in a playful mood: Cute and Terrified. In that routine, I’d find some dark alley or secluded place and start screaming for dear life. Eventually, some macho guy would come running and, well, let’s just say there was some screaming and running on his part. I’d play cat-and-mouse with him for a bit before, you know … eating.
I’ll admit it: I was a real bitch back then. But part of me being human again was atoning for all the bad I did when I was the monster who went bump in the night.
The other students shuffled out of the class, but no Justin. No worries. He had sat in the front of the class, so it made sense it would take him a while to get to me. But when the auditorium went quiet, I dared a glance and saw that everyone was gone. Everyone including Professor Hayes. I was totally alone.
Except for the kid from Africa, who stared at me from two rows down. Evidently, I wasn’t cute enough for Justin to stop and talk to me.
Disappointed, I packed my stuff and stood up. As I did, the kid—who was totally checking me out, by the way, and not in a cute kind of way, but in a creepy-stalker way—kept his eyes on me. It felt like he was looking through me, rather than at me.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I was human, but I wasn’t helpless. I knew things—like where all the major arteries were and which nerves crippled your prey versus the ones that absolutely paralyzed them. Plus, in my travels, I had studied a variety of martial arts. A lot. I figured I was probably one of only a handful of humans with such a wide range of styles, and I’d had hundreds of years to practice them. But although I knew what I was capable of, my heart still raced when I met his gaze and I said in the harshest tone I could muster, “What?”
The guy didn’t flinch. He just sniffed the air and said, “You should have stood up.”
“What? When?”
“You know when.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just a girl. A human girl.”
“Sure you are,” he said.
“I am,” I repeated as I slung my bag over my shoulder, leaving the room as fast as I could—and feeling his eyes on me the whole way.
Out in the main hall, I saw Justin mulling about with his McConnell Hall buddies. They jokingly called themselves the Omega Omega Omega (O3 for short) Bros. Their little gang were legends on campus for throwing the biggest and baddest parties.
I think they got their name because the Latin letter Omega is mistakenly associated with the Apocalypse. You know—God saying He was the Alpha and Omega and all that. And given that the departure of the gods was an apocalypse of sorts, I guess they were tripling down on the rhetoric. I kinda wanted to tell them that Omega didn’t mean the end, but rather the concept of God being the Alpha and Omega was to give Him a cyclical, renewing nature. You know, circle-of-life kind of stuff. The gods leaving made that Biblical quote kind of meaningless, anyway. But these guys were teenagers on the cusp of adulthood—they were far more interested in the cool factor of the name than anything else. Who was I to burst their bubble?
Besides—Justin made the O3s cool. He made everything cool.
The O3 Bros were standing in a line, handing out flyers alongside an Incan apu who was in the history class with us. They were jostling each other, seeming to be having a good time. Professor Hayes’s warning that we should all get along turned out to be unnecessary. Here were three humans and an Incan apu—an Other belonging to a religion that was now ancient history—and they were getting on just fine.
I tried to position myself so that Justin would hand me one of the flyers, but instead I was intercepted by the apu. Apus were Incan nature spirits and were usually associated with a place—a forest, a river, even a town. These spirits were defenders. If you ever caused trouble in a place protected by one of these guys, you were in for one hell of a fight.
Up close the apu looked like a normal human except for one, eerie difference: he was made of rock. I don’t mean like the Thing in Fantastic Four, nor do I mean he was carved from stone like a gargoyle. His skin was the color of a cave floor, like it was made from slate, with tiny ridges that swooped along his forearm, giving it a weathered look.
But that wasn’t the strangest or most captivating part of him. No, that was reserved for his eyes. It is said that the eyes are windows to the soul—but this apu’s eyes were more like actual windows to the outside. Like I was sitting in a tunnel looking outside to the clear blue, endless sky. Beautiful, eerie, intense.
The apu handed me a flyer and our fingers briefly touched. His skin didn’t only look like a rock, it felt like it, too. Hard, rigid—like touching a moving stone. What’s more, he had dust on his skin, and as I took the flyer, a little bit of sand rolled down its front. This guy flaked sand like some humans flaked dandruff.
I read the flyer:
O3 cordially invites you to
THE END OF THE WORLD
When the gods left, they started an apocalypse.
We aim to finish it.
The O3 party—the first big party of the semester—was two days from now, on the anniversary of the gods’ GrandExodus.
And I was invited.
“So—you in?” His voice had an echo to it, like he was talking in a cave or something. It was a bit unsettling, because generally when one echo was present, all the ambient sounds echoed, too. But here, it was only him. The shuffle of students milling about was perfectly normal.
“Your voice …” I said.
He smiled, like his voice was something that got him a lot of attention from … well … the girls. I guess we all have a shtick—and his was to impress the impressionable with his resonance. “I’m a cave apu—caves have echoes, hence my voice,” he reverberated. “Actually, I was one of the twelve sacred apus of Cusco.” When I gave him a blank look, he followed up with, “Cusco was the capital of the Incan Empire in the fifteenth century.”
“Ahh, so a big deal. Five hundred years ago.”
“Oh, y
eah—very big deal five hundred years ago,” he chuckled. Sticking out his hand, he said, “I’m Sal.”
“Oddly normal name for a guy like you, wouldn’t you say?”
He gave me a shy smile and said, “My real name’s Salkantay, as in the highest peak in the Vilcabamba mountain region. You know—the Peruvian Andes.”
I nodded. I’d been there. Granted, that was 180 years ago, but still, I’d seen the place.
Sal closed his sky-like eyes for just a second, but I swear it felt like night had suddenly fallen. Then, when he opened them, a light sky with big puffy clouds returned. “Anyway,” he said, almost embarrassed, “the guys thought it was best to give me a more, ahhh, human name. You see Nate over there—he came up with ‘Sal.’ ” He pointed at the shortest of the Bros, a kid with brown hair cut in a buzz, and I could see genuine affection in those impossibly beautiful eyes of his. “I think they meant it to be ironic. Something so average for someone who looks so different. But I can tell you that I am very honored to be given such a normal name. It means they don’t see me as an Other, but as a friend.”
He’s right. The fact that those guys teased him by giving him such a boring name means they accepted him as one of them.
“Boring name?”
Damn it—talking out loud again. I could feel my cheeks flush with embarrassment. “ ‘Sal’ certainly isn’t Algernon or Constantine … so, yeah, boring.”
“Yeah, but these days I’ll take boring over the alternative.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“So, the party,” he said, tapping the flyer in my hands and sending another wave of sand down the paper. “It’s this Friday. Will you come?”
“Maybe …” I said, throwing in as much coyness as I could.
Evidently, the coyness didn’t take, because he said, “Great, see you then,” and went on to hand another flyer to three girls behind me.
I folded the flyer and put it in my purse. I waved at Justin. He gave me a subtle nod as he continued to play-wrestle with Nate without losing stride. If anything were to happen between Justin and me, it wouldn’t be now. And so, taking that as my cue, I headed out to the main campus, where I hesitated at the threshold. My foot nervously hovered just behind the line where the shade met the light. Like I said—old habits do die hard.
I took a deep breath and stepped into the light. Even though I knew I was human, I still breathed a sigh of relief that I didn’t burst into a ball of flames.
Yay, me!
Beggars Evidently Can Be Choosers
& Even Cool Kids Can Be Awkward
The sun didn’t disintegrate me—so at least one thing was going my way today. I know it’s irrational for me to be scared of natural light, but you have to understand that I was a vampire one minute and then a human the next, while fang-deep in some vicar’s neck. It was like someone had flipped a switch. On—vampire. Off—human.
If the vampire switch could be switched off, for all I knew it could be switched back on just as suddenly. And if I happened to be outside … great balls of flame à la moi!
I really should start walking around with an umbrella.
Just when that thought occurred to me, my eyes were drawn to the large oak tree in the center of the quad, beside that GoneGods-awful statue of the university founder, where I spotted three human hockey players tormenting some homeless guy. Except, given his unearthly pale white skin and ruby-red eyes, this homeless man clearly wasn’t a man at all. He was an Other. A type of Other I’d never seen before.
I was pretty hip to Others—able to recognize most of them on sight, thank you very much—but this one eluded me. He didn’t even have any of the telltale signs of what religion or folklore he belonged to. There was no wispy mustache so typical of Chinese traditions, no protruding lower-jaw tusks most Japanese demons had and no animalistic and oddly two-dimensional attributes you found in most Egyptian Others.
Instead, he—I think he was a “he”—wore baggy white pants that were scuffed and dirty but when clean would have matched his impossibly white skin. He had a long-sleeve dirty white shirt on that looked more like undergarments than a proper top. His hair was also the same white as his skin, and because the coloring matched so perfectly, it looked more like strands of skin on his head than actual dead-skin-cells-and-keratin hair. In fact, the only thing he had on him that wasn’t white was his cane—a crooked oak staff that looked too flimsy to actually support someone’s body weight. Not that he had much weight to him. He was absolutely emaciated. The term skin-and-bones didn’t do him justice. It was more like skin-sundried-on-bones. Poor guy must’ve been dying of hunger.
The lead human—a largish guy with black hair and a nose that looked like it had been broken, set wrong, then broken again—kicked the homeless guy and shouted, “Get out of here, you freak!”
A second human—a smaller, skinny guy with blond hair tied back in a ponytail that will totally embarrass him when he is older and looks back at pictures of himself—said, “Bad enough they let these freaks enroll in the school, but now we have to put up with their vagrants, too. Oh, hell no!” He emphasized this by spitting on the Other.
That was the last straw. I ran down the steps of the building, over to the tree, and grabbed the skinny guy. Using a move I learned from a judo master in Kyoto some 150 years ago, I pulled him back so that he fell over his own feet and tumbled backward.
I put myself between the other two humans and the Other and, summoning a real gem that I probably got from Degrassi: The Next Generation or Beverly Hills, 90210, said, “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” Stupid really, because I was picking a fight with them, and all three of these guys were way bigger than me. I really had to work on my vernacular.
The biggest one pointed at me and said, “Get out of our way, little girl. Otherwise—”
I grabbed his finger and twisted. This wasn’t a move from any martial art I’d learned, but something I’d used against my little brother when I was human—three hundred years ago, sure, but it still did the trick. The big guy cried out in pain and tried to punch me with his free hand. I pulled back and kicked his shin, forcing his left leg out and his right knee down. Then, when we were about eye level, I punched him. Hard. In the nose.
There was a sickening crunch! Given how little power my punches usually packed—since I became human, at least—I must’ve been right about his nose being broken before. The thing crumpled like a paper cup. He dropped to the ground, blood pouring out of him.
His friend, a slightly smaller version of him, sized me up and decided to charge.
Employing a move I learned from an aikido master in San Francisco (about forty years ago, if you’re keeping track), I used his own momentum against him, guiding his body into the wall behind me. He hit face-first and dropped to his knees.
The ponytail guy stood up, saw his downed buddies and ran. The other two managed to collect themselves from the grass, the bigger guy still clutching his blood-gushing nose, and followed their friend. I half expected them to say something like “You haven’t seen the last of us!” or “We’ll get you, just you wait and see!” but I didn’t get any of those cliché gems as they ran away.
Looking around to see if there were any other threats, I saw that a bunch of people were looking at me from all around the quad. And not just students. Professors, Others—heck, even Justin Truly was watching from the steps of the Arts building across the quad. Suddenly, several of them started clapping, then hooting, then cheering.
I guess standing up for this Other was a … good thing?
I realized something, blushing as my peers and professors clapped me on the back. I may not be smooth or the bee’s knees or even the cat’s pajamas, but I was heroic … and in this new GoneGod World, that seemed to count for a lot.
After I gave a few bows and enthusiastic thumbs-up, people went about their usual business again. I turned to the homeless Other, fished through my bag and pulled out a granola bar that had been sitting at its bo
ttom for weeks. I handed it to the guy, half expecting him to eat it cellophane and all.
But he didn’t. Instead, he read the wrapper in detail and, breathing a sigh of relief, handed the unopened granola bar back. “Thank you,” he said.
“You can have it. I mean—eat it.” I tried to hand it back.
The strange Other looked at me with a confused expression on his face. “I already did.” He groaned. “Not very good.”
“OK …” I said with trepidation. I had to admit, though, that this guy looked a little better after having read the package. I was beginning to wonder if this weird Other didn’t eat granola. Or oats. Or whatever this supposed nature bar was made of. Made sense—after all, you would no more give a rabbit steak than a lion a carrot. For some Others, eating mortal food was deadly. Maybe that’s why this poor guy was so emaciated. Human food just didn’t work for him.
“So, no granola?”
He shook his head. “No granola,” he whispered.
“So what can you eat?”
“The truth?” The poor guy was so weak that he was having trouble speaking.
“Yeah, the truth,” I said, trying to throw in as much empathy as I could. It was possible that this kind of Other ate something very unappealing to humans. Kappa ate algae. Pixies considered maggots a delicacy. And succubae ate— Well, succubae drew nourishment from sex. Besides, who was I to judge? For three hundred years I lived entirely off of human blood. Let she who is without sin cast the first stone. Stones firmly in pocket.
Being a bona fide Homo sapiens and law-abiding citizen meant there was no way I could have sustained myself on pig and cow blood. Believe me, I had tried and it nearly killed me. But that’s another story. As for these newly mortal Others, algae, maggots and sex weren’t something you could get at your local grocery store or farmer’s market, so kappa learned to eat kale, pixies substituted nuts for maggots and succubae bought naughty mags for a quick snack. It must have been a rough existence, and rarely a day goes by that I don’t silently thank the GoneGods for taking their magic and turning me human again.