by Neha Yazmin
Chapter 8: Abilities
“It was the most painful thing I’d ever experienced. Vampire teeth are sharp! They’re hard as marble. Coated in venom. It sucked the breath out of me when Lydia’s teeth sank into my neck. I realised then, that I’d never experienced true agony in my life.
“I wanted to die. I wondered why I wasn’t dead from the searing heat that coursed through my body, paralysing me. The way I felt, I thought I was going to be burned from the inside out. It should’ve killed me. I wanted it to kill me. The burning was all there was. On fire, her icy hands on me didn’t cool me down.
“And it got worse.
“All she did was bite me, once. But that is all it takes. Enough of her venom infiltrated my body, soaring through my veins and incinerating everything along the way. When she let go of me and stepped back, I collapsed to the floor. Uselessly, I tried to get up but I couldn’t control my limbs.
“Not that I was motionless.
“I convulsed uncontrollably, my body jerking and flapping about in pain. Screaming without knowing I was doing it. Crying for the first time in my life. Begging for death to claim me for the flames lapping at my veins showed no signs of dying.
“Lydia stayed with me during the three days it took for the venom to spread and change me completely, but she wasn’t there when the burning stopped. When I could actually concentrate on something other than how I was alight with flames, I realised I was alone in the room.
“Then I thought I was going mad.
“I heard voices, chatter, conversations and laughter, so vivid and so close to me that I became certain that whatever had happened to me had made me delusional. There was not a soul in the room but I could hear so many different people speaking. I could hear them walk and talk. Hear them cook, clean, eat, drink, and anything else they were doing. I heard so much!
“And I could smell them. Smell everything. Particularly their blood. The scent of human blood was the most potent of all, the sweetest. The most appealing. It made my throat burn and I just knew that the burning would be extinguished only by drinking blood.
“It was pure instinct.”
“So, you realised you were a… vampire?” Selma asked wearily.
“I had no idea what I was. Whether I was even sane anymore. As I shifted in the bed I’d been placed in, the door to the room opened. Lydia had heard the movement and was there in a flash.
“I remember that moment as being the most beautiful of my entire existence. Lydia, standing in the doorway, a crooked smile on her face, was a sight to behold. I knew she was stunning, but appreciating her with my improved vision, my upgraded brain, I found her to be breathtaking.”
“You fell in love,” the teenager said, a hint of a smile on her lips. Girls love their romance.
“I definitely fell into something…” At that time, I was sure it was love of the strongest kind. The kind that lasted an eternity.
Turns out, it wasn’t love.
And it only lasted half a century.
“I knew at that moment that I’d follow her everywhere. Do anything for her. I was hers. And she knew it. Knew it before I even said it because she’d seen the future.”
“What?”
“Yes. As a human, she used to have very strange dreams,” I explained. “Premonition-like dreams. When she became a vampire, this gift of hers magnified, intensified, like all our human abilities do after we change.
“At first, she had premonitions lasting no longer than a couple of seconds. Some were simply static images, like a photograph of a future event. But our gifts develop and strengthen over time – the only thing that grows after we become frozen in this unchanging state – so now the visions are longer. She can sort of hold on to them, stop them from fading away and see more of the future. Provided you’re a vampire, of course.”
“Huh?”
“For some unknown reason, there’s a strange kink in her talent. She can’t see humans. If a vampire’s future is closely linked to a human’s, then she can’t see that vampire so clearly either, and definitely not events that involve the human.
“The human muddies the water.
“She can see vampires while they’re still human, meaning they’ll soon become one of us, but the vision is still of the future vampire. Not the current human.
“What annoys her most however,” and I chuckled as I said this, “is the fact that most of her premonitions are still just as random as when she was human. They just come to her out of the blue. She can’t induce or trigger them, though she tries. It takes a lot out of her too, if she chooses to focus on one particular vampire’s future.”
“She gets tired?”
“No, we never tire. All that happens, much to her dismay, is that she’ll miss a few of her usual random visions. Focusing on a specific immortal’s every move, cancels out the premonitions about other events and future vampires. Since her job is to source potential new members of our world, she very rarely fixates on one individual.”
“Potential?” Selma enquired, arching her eyebrows.
“The future isn’t set in stone. It can alter due to millions of reasons.”
“Her job?”
“Even immortals have to work,” I sighed jokily before briefly touching on the topic of my employer.
“The System?” the teen laughed. “That doesn’t sound very scary or exciting.”
“It’s not meant to be either. The System is vampire government, only there’s just one party that governs us all, across the world, always. It exists to provide order and structure to our world, maintain the balance. But most of all, to keep our existence a secret from humans. Clean up if a vampire leaves a suspicious mess.”
“And find all future vampires?” the girl probed, recalling what I’d said about Lydia’s responsibilities.
“Not necessarily. I suppose I wasn’t quite clear before. One of Lydia’s roles is to keep an eye out for any vampire that’ll be beneficial for The System to have on its payroll. She hates it when I joke about this, but she’s like a head-hunter.”
Selma chuckled. “So what’s your job-title?
“We don’t really have titles but there is a hierarchy in place,” I answered. “Our European HQ is in London, Mac is the Head of European Operations. Me and Lydia are his… deputies, if you like.”
“What do you do?”
“I do a lot of things, Selma. Anything where my ability is an asset or necessity.”
“You used to be a good spy… you could go unnoticed very easily… how did that gift manifest itself when you changed?”
“Quite dramatically actually.” I gave her a grin and told her about my shield.
“Wow. That’s pretty cool. I just don’t get how it works.” She sighed glumly.
“Neither do I,” I shrugged.
“You’re not doing anything to yourself or to anyone physically, because you’re still there and their eyes still see you. You just block the signal from registering with their brain.”
“You do get it then.” I was impressed.
“That part, yes.” She nodded thoughtfully. “But when you erase yourself from their memory, make them think you don’t exist, what are you doing then?”
“I’m not sure what I do exactly, I just think of it as creating different types of blind-spots in different parts of their minds and perceptions.” I shrugged.
“And you don’t even know these people, don’t know their minds. How can you just dig holes in them all at the same time?”
“I don’t really know.”
“But how do you approach it? What do you actually do?”
“Same thing I do when I want to hide from one person. The thing is Selma, we’re all connected. Grouped by one thing or another. Species, gender, age, location, and even by our intentions. In our minds, we’re always categorising ourselves with those that share a certain common ground with us. I just find that link between people and treat it as one mind, one big lens.”
“Elaborate…
” She seemed to be getting my point. Smart girl.
“Okay, you see yourself as a part of the student body that attends your college, right?”
She nodded.
“As does every other student there. In your mind, you’re all one, in the sense that you study at the same institution. It’s like a collective conscience, almost. For me, this links all your minds and I see it as one giant lens made up of all your little lenses. So, I can will my ink to splatter across this lens; in other words, on the minds of all those who go to your college. I don’t pretend to understand how it works, but it does.
“Obviously mental blind-spots are harder to achieve than the visual ones, and the more minds involved the more I need to concentrate. It’s more difficult erasing myself from peoples’ memories, though it’s easier to do this with humans than with vampires, but how I approach it is the same.
“My ink, their lenses.”