by Rain Oxford
“I thought vampires couldn’t see their reflection in the mirror.”
She grinned at me. “That’s a myth.”
“How did you become a vampire? Are you really a kid?”
“I am eleven years old. I grow just like you and I have been this for as long as I can remember. Grandfather said my parents were human, but I don’t know that I believe him. I believe that I will stop growing when I’m an adult. I know that children who are turned don’t grow at all, so I don’t know why I am aging.”
I smiled. “It’s because of me. It’s because we were meant to be friends and grow up together.”
She didn’t smile back. “Do you really want to stay with me? Do you really trust me?”
“You’ve never done anything to hurt me.”
Slowly, she returned and sat beside me on the bed. For a minute, it looked like she wanted to say something, but she couldn’t figure out how. What she was feeling was hard to express; she never had anyone who trusted her before.
And then she kissed me. It wasn’t like in the movies; it was soft and hesitant and her mouth was closed. It was perfect though.
I told Astrid about the blood banks and she said she was willing to try it. As soon as the sun set, I pulled the blanket down and she slipped silently out my window. I followed her out onto the flowerbed and hesitated, afraid to make the three-foot hop across to her flowerbed. From the safety of her window, she smiled and held out her hand for me.
“Even if you slipped, I wouldn’t let you fall,” she said.
I took her hand and jumped. My shoe slipped on the slick metal and I closed my eyes as I started to fall, only to feel Astrid’s arms close around me and pull me in through her window. She was strong. That wasn’t a myth.
“I told you I wouldn’t let you fall.”
Her room was empty; there was nothing on her walls and only a blackout curtain over her window. Her closet was bare except for a box, from which she poured out clothes in front of me. They were all old clothes, as if she had found them somewhere.
“Pick something out for me,” she said.
I picked up a bright pink dress, about ten times too big for Astrid, and cringed. I understood why she always wore the nightgown. There was a brown boy’s sweatshirt and a pair of dark blue pajama bottoms, so I told her to wear them.
“Are you sure your grandfather isn’t going to come home? Or did you kill him?” I asked.
“He won’t come back at night.”
“Your grandfather isn’t a vampire?” She just shook her head and started to change.
Out of curiosity more than anything else, I explored her house. There was nothing to find; all of the rooms were empty except for the grandfather’s room, which I feared entering. He had clothes and books strewn across the floor and a makeshift bed of blankets and a small pillow.
Yet there was nothing in the kitchen. I understood Astrid not eating, but what did her grandfather eat if he wasn’t a vampire?
“When do you eat?” I asked loudly as I searched her empty cabinets. The large white fridge and small black microwave were plugged in, but bare and spotless.
“When you are asleep,” her voice was a whisper and right behind me, but I didn’t jump.
She was wearing the clothes, which were way too big for her. The way she fiddled with her sleeve seemed odd because I didn’t think vampires did that. There was something too human about her.
* * *
We made our way through the most deserted streets. Although some people shouted at us to get home or asked where our parents were, we ignored them. Astrid told me there would be alarms and cameras, but that she could get around them easily.
We never made it.
We were passing an alley when I heard a gunshot and a woman scream. I turned and tried to see what happened, but Astrid stopped me with a grip on my arm that was tight enough to leave bruises. “Leave it. Never go towards a gunshot.”
“But someone could be hurt.”
“Most likely, they’re already dead.” There was no sympathy or worry in her eyes because she had seen death too many times. It was just a fact to her.
Before I could do anything, the gunman emerged from the alley. “Shit!” he cursed when he saw us.
He looked like a typical bad guy; scruffy hair, scruffy face, torn and dirty clothes… I could never have remembered his face or picked him out of a lineup. He didn’t need to aim the gun at me. I knew even as he did it that he was trying to cover his tracks. That was what they did in the movies. Begging was pointless.
I didn’t even cry.
I reached for Astrid’s hand because I wanted hers to be the last hand I felt… but she was already too far away. Faster than I could see, she crashed into the man and tore out his throat with her teeth. I was still frozen when she was back in front of me. Her hands were so gentle on my face as she tried to get me to focus. The man was lying dead on the ground and blood was pooling. She hadn’t drunk his blood. It wasn’t about that. She killed him to save me.
Am I okay with that?
“Yes,” I said softly. I forced myself to focus on her. “I’m okay. You saved me.” We shouldn’t have been outside in the city at night anyway. It was our fault. “Let’s go home. We’ll try again tomorrow, but we’ll go a different way.”
An hour later, we were in bed and Astrid was cuddled against my chest, but she was cold. While she never felt temperature herself, she hadn’t gotten enough blood from me and it made her skin cold to the touch. I asked her why she didn’t feed from the man and she told me his blood was bad.
I didn’t feel danger from Astrid because she would never hurt me. Still, I had trouble sleeping that night. Something was wrong.
* * *
I woke not to my mother’s gentle knocking but to her scream. I shot out of bed and down the hallway before I knew what was happening. My parents’ door was opened and their room was empty, so I went downstairs.
It was still dark out and the absolute silence made me shiver. “Mom?” I called. Something soaked into my socks on the bottom step. It was warm and slimy, not like water. “Mom?” I felt dread. Deep, dark, all-consuming dread of what I was about to see. I wanted to stop time right there so that nothing bad could happen.
I stepped off the stairs onto the carpet of the living room and felt the horrible squish. Tears dripped down my cheeks, yet I couldn’t make a sound. I was waiting, holding my breath, for my mother to answer me. If she would just answer me, everything will be okay.
The kitchen was open to the living room, so I saw my fears realized the moment I turned. I saw the blood first, and then my father’s arm on the tile floor. Just his arm. Still silent, I went into the kitchen. Astrid sat cross-legged on the floor, covered in blood. My parents were both dead, my father in pieces, as was another, older man. She looked up at me. Her eyes were lost like they had been when she was injured.
I prayed that she hadn’t done this.
I knew better.
“Now you don’t have parents either,” she whispered, blood drying in clumps on her chin. The blood looked like tar on her dark brown sweatshirt. “Now I can take care of you and we’ll go anywhere we want. You can do magic and I can protect you. I’ll take care of you. Grandfather can’t hurt you like he did Seda.”
The dead stranger was her grandfather who had locked her in a cage. Had he come to kill her? Had he come to protect my parents? He had been right to lock her up, but this was also his fault. She wasn’t like this before.
Most of all, it was my fault. I trusted her. I loved her. I saved her. I let her into my home.
I turned without a word and went back upstairs. I flipped on the light of my parents’ room, opened the closet door, and fell to my knees. My legs couldn’t hold me up anymore. I pulled out a box— the furthest box in the corner. The next thing I knew, my hand was shaking as I held my father’s gun. It was heavier than it looked when I saw him put it up. He was so sure it would save us if there was a break in. I raised the barrel tow
ards myself. I couldn’t stop shaking.
Then her hands closed over it and she lowered it gently. “No,” she whispered against my ear, as if she could soothe me. She put her arms around me and pressed her chest against my back. “I’ll take care of you. I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
I was no longer thinking at all. The only thing going through my mind was the images of my parents dead. I would never feel my father’s heavy hand pat my hair again, or listen to my mother fuss over my clothes being wrinkled. The feeling of permanence at that moment was the heaviest thing I had ever felt in my life.
I raised the gun again, slowly.
“Devon, stop.” She sat back and turned me to face her. “You said you wanted to be with me. We couldn’t be together with them alive.”
I nodded. “I know.” I turned the gun and shot her.
The next thing I was aware of was lying on the kitchen floor in my mother’s arms and crying. That was how the police found me. Apparently I had called them and told them my neighbor had killed my parents. Officer Cody Hyatt pried me gently from my mother. I screamed and tried to bite him to make him let me go, but he just sat down on the couch and rocked me like a tiny child. Eventually, I relented.
I spent the next three days with Cody because I would scream when anyone else tried to take me. All I could see in my head was Astrid finding me and killing everyone else. Cody was the only one to show me more kindness than my parents and Astrid. I wouldn’t let her kill him, too. I vowed to protect him against her. That was when he took me to see my mother.
She had made it alive, barely. Cody let me sit with her for hours. After visiting every day for a week, one of the nurses brought a book in, which I read aloud my mother. It was the first time I spoke since I shot Astrid.
Only Astrid was never found. Her body was gone and so was the gun.
A month later, Cody was driving me to the hospital. My instincts had been bugging me all night; telling me something horrible was about to happen again. When I told Cody about it, he accepted it and didn’t ridicule me. Instead, he suggested I was worried about my mother and drove me to see her. We never made it.
A semi ran a red light, smashed into a pickup, and slammed it into the driver’s side of Cody’s cruiser. My last thought as I was dragged from the crumpled car was that if I could only touch him, I could heal him like I had Astrid.
* * *
“I killed you,” I said. My voice was surprisingly steady as I aimed the gun at Astrid’s head. She wasn’t wearing an innocent nightgown anymore. She was fully grown and had developed into a very beautiful, yet small woman at around five-four. Her dark brown hair fell over her shoulders in thick waves and her eyes were lighter brown than they once were, almost hazel with some specks of green. She wore a fitted leather jacket, tight jeans, and high-heeled boots.
She grinned. “I was in perfect health after feeding on your parents. No shot to the chest with a human weapon was going to hurt me.”
“Good. I’m glad I didn’t kill you. These bullets are silver.” I shot her in the shoulder. It wasn’t a kill shot because I wanted her to suffer. Before she could even scream, I shot her again in the right knee. She collapsed. I shot her in the other shoulder.
Her scream of agony was long overdue. I felt her trying to open my mind to her, but I created a mental wall between us that could never be broken through.
I would never invite her in again. I shot her other knee.
“Devon!”
I barely heard Hunt’s yell. All I wanted to hear was Astrid screaming. I vaguely felt Hunt’s power close around the gun before it became too heavy to lift. I dropped it and instead focused on the hate inside me. I focused on the image of blood and bodies on the kitchen floor. I focused on the feeling of my trust being betrayed and the feeling of knowing that their deaths were on my hands because I trusted her. Heat filled my entire body until I couldn’t contain it any more. I reached out as if to push her back and what burst from my hands was a sinister form of energy. It was like lighting and struck her as such. She screamed.
“Devon, stop.”
The voice was one I never thought I would hear again in my life and was certainly the only one in the world that could have stopped me. I turned to see Cody standing beside Hunt. I gasped, rendered silent, which seemed to be my normal reaction to shock. Hunt’s expression was of pity, Stephen’s was of worry, while Cody’s was just sort of sad. Astrid stopped screaming, but she wasn’t getting up any time soon. “How?” I finally whispered.
“Astrid saved me. They took you away and then focused on saving those they thought had a chance. They thought I was dead on impact, but I wasn’t. There was just enough life in me to be changed. Astrid had followed and tried to take care of you from a distance. She figured out that I was important to you. She saved me to help you.”
“Why didn’t you find me then? I thought you were dead all these years.” I was more shocked than upset or angry.
“I was… too confused at first. I wasn’t in control of myself. Stephen found us, took us in, and helped us both.” He stepped towards me, I glanced down at the gun, and he froze. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“You’re a vampire.”
“I’m still the one who soothed you every night for more than a month when you had nightmares. I am the same person who sat with you for hours-on-end while you read to your mother. I may need blood to survive now, but my heart still beats. I’m still alive. Vampires aren’t the undead like in the movies. I remember everything, I feel the same way. I still crave yogurt.”
“In twenty years, you never thought to tell me you were alive?” My voice chose that damn minute to crack.
“You hate vampires. I knew you wouldn’t be able to accept this until you realized what you are.”
“What am I?”
“A wizard. I knew it even when I was human that you could become one of the most powerful wizards that ever existed. You could naturally do what took a normal wizard many years to learn. That’s why I pointed you out to Vincent.”
Hunt sighed as if he just realized that life was a tangled mess. Only this couldn’t be my life. In my life, everyone who was important to me was dead except my mother, who could barely function. “What’s with Vincent Knight? Why does he keep popping up? Who is he?”
Cody blanched and looked away. “I think you’re in shock. You don’t need anything else to think about today.”
“What are you talking about? You can’t just drop his name and then not tell me!”
“I didn’t say his name,” he said quietly. I fell silent. “I thought that last part; I hadn’t said it aloud.”
He ran his fingers through his hair like he used to when his work was getting stressful. Cody worked so hard every single day of his life to help every person he could. I had told him once, close to the end, that I wanted to be a cop like him when I grew up. He sat me down and told me the bad side of his job. There were many things he had to do, bad guys he had to let go, because of technicalities. It wore on him and he said that he didn’t want that tainting me. He said that as long as I never let hate into my heart, I would help people every day.
I later decided to become a private investigator only to realize I wasn’t helping anyone. I became an investigator to keep people safe from those like Astrid, but then I stubbornly refused to work on anything paranormal. When Cody died, I wrote off everyone who wasn’t human as a villain.
Only Cody wasn’t dead.
“How did you know I was a wizard?”
“You must not remember it. You were always doing magic. Once, I had gotten cut when a knock on the door distracted me from slicing apples. You came right up to me and healed it without a word. And there was a dog next door that would bark all night long. You talked to that dog and found out that his master’s wife was cheating. I had some friends in the paranormal world and tried to get you somewhere that would help… but we never made it that far.”
“I have to go.” I had to get away from Cody and
Astrid before I threw up. Astrid tried to reach for my ankle, as she was still bleeding out on the floor. I knew she would survive; that was what she did.
Avoiding looking at her, I picked up my gun and I stepped around her, not letting her touch me. She may have stopped Cody from dying, but she didn’t save him. He would turn on me like she had. I made it back to the car without a single wrong turn and locked all the doors once I was inside.
About an hour later, I had cooled off enough to let Hunt, Alpha Flagstone, and Professor Nightshade in when they approached the SUV. Both professors had some colorful bruises and tears in their clothes, but they seemed almost giddy.
* * *
It was a long drive, which gave me ample time to rethink my life. I didn’t know what to think of Astrid, because all I could see was her face when I healed her as a child. I didn’t want to still love her, but I needed to know that I was still capable of love. Can I accept Cody knowing what he is? Astrid betrayed me because she was a vampire. She saved Cody’s life after killing my father and trying to kill my mother.
When we arrived at the school, Hunt ordered the other two to go to bed and for me to follow him. I did, kind of numb, and found myself sitting in the chair in his office. He handed me a glass of the same amber liquid he gave me during our first chat.
“I don’t think this is the right time for---”
“Shut up and drink it. You had a long day…” he drank from his own glass, “… and my daughter is missing. She could be dying right now.” He shuddered and swallowed down the rest of his glass.
“Isn’t there a locating spell or something?”
“There is, but whoever has her is using counter spells. Or she is already…” He trailed off, unable to finish his sentence, and I drank my drink down in one gulp. It burned fast, but the distraction was nice.
“What Cody said about me being so powerful…? Was that true?”