A few seconds later, I actually felt my fangs descend, and when I looked up at him, his were already bared. Not having had sex in a long time without feeding on the person also, I guess this was natural, but it struck me as a little weird.
“Wait,” he said, breathless, “is this okay?”
“It’s great,” I said, barely getting the words out and wishing that Matt would stop talking.
“No, no. Do we need a condom or something?”
I was confused for a moment and then I realized what he was talking about.
“Oh. No. We’re both sterile. Vampires are sterile.”
Had I not told him that? Guess this was as good as any time for a lesson.
* * *
All was silent, except the sound of our breathing going back to normal, and I realized that Matt was still alive. I would not feed on him and we would go about our day together. I felt my fangs recede.
We rested a few minutes, and then Matt pushed himself up, hopped off the bed and walked to the bathroom. He returned a minute later, and then I did the same.
When I lay back down, he was lying on his side and his eyes were closed, but I was wide awake.
I put my arms underneath my head and looked out my bedroom window into the sunlight, exposing my breasts as the sheet slid down my torso a little.
I looked and I thought and I rested as Matt napped, and I was finally snapped out of my reverie when I felt his arm go across my torso.
We could do this every day, all day, if we wanted to. For the rest of eternity.
I caressed his arm and felt genuinely warm with him lying next to me.
And I also felt completely and utterly trapped.
4
“What did you find out?” I asked.
It was later in the day, and Matt and I had braved the sunlight for seven minutes to walk over to Lola’s apartment.
I was just starting to feel—itchy, I think is the best way to describe it—when we reached her building. The cool shade of the interior was like having a bucket of water poured over my body, and I exhaled in relief.
When I knocked on Lola’s door and had Matt with me, she didn’t look surprised at all, but she also didn’t ask me any questions, which I was grateful for. I hadn’t let her know directly that we were coming, but of course I didn’t need to.
“What’s up?” she said as I walked in the door and Matt followed behind me.
“That’s what I came to ask you,” I said and sat down in a chair in her living room.
“Not much,” she said. She patted Matt’s arm in greeting, and he smiled at her. “No one knows anything. No one else has seen the guy, much less knows who he is. Still, we’ve got other eyes looking for us now. If anyone sees or hears anything they’re going to let me know.”
“Maybe we should try to find him, rather than letting him come to us,” I said, although I didn’t know how we could do that. “You don’t have a radar on him at all?”
“No. I’ve got nothing. He’s not vampire, Vic.”
I sat for a moment and looked over at Matt, who seemed to know what I was about to say.
“Lola,” I said, very slowly, “I think he’s my creator.”
She had almost no reaction to this, which surprised me, but then I realized she thought this was completely impossible. Like I had just told her the sky was green.
“That can’t be.”
“I know,” I said and then got up and started walking around, picking up stuff and putting it back down. “But, I just have this feeling...”
“He’s not a vampire, Vic. Not at all. He can’t be your creator.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but I’m telling you he’s my creator. He called me Victoria, remember?”
“Which is odd, but not enough to get me to believe that a non-vampire, non-human is somehow your creator. I mean, how is he not a vampire anymore?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there some kind of a cure? I mean, for vampirism. Can you be cured of it?” Matt asked.
Lola and I both turned and looked at Matt as if he had committed some grievous social error, and then I remembered how new he really was.
The myth of the cure had been debunked long ago, before either Lola or I had been created, but it had apparently gained quite a bit of popularity. As vampire history goes, it had people who sought it out like it was the holy grail, and those who would have done anything to deny it existed. In the end, The Three had to be brought out of sleep in order to verify that it did not exist, which was serious because they did not like to be awakened.
I never thought about it much myself, and I was glad that it didn’t actually exist because then there was no reason to even consider it. I was one of the lucky ones who knew my fate and could accept it for what it was.
“No, there is no cure,” I said and made a mental note to tell Matt about the history of the cure later. I couldn’t have him going around talking this way to other vampires.
“Well, maybe he’s a werewolf,” Matt said and smiled this time.
I couldn’t blame him for thinking that, and I smiled back at him while Lola rolled her eyes and then laughed.
“There are no werewolves,” she said. “There are vampires and humans. Nothing else, but I guess I can’t blame you for thinking that given the entertainment you’re probably used to.”
Matt actually looked disappointed.
“Are you serious?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Lola said and turned to me to verify. I nodded.
Matt slumped down in his chair and furrowed his brow.
“But why?”
This was a funny question for me to consider, and judging from the look on Lola’s face, for her too.
“I don’t know,” I finally said.
Matt sat forward now, looking like he wanted to ask something else but wasn’t sure what.
“Well, where do vampires come from?”
I suddenly felt like a parent trying to give a “birds and bees” talk to a child, and I got uncomfortable as I realized how much I didn’t know.
“The Three,” Lola said before I could answer, and I flinched a little as she said the name out loud.
“What’s The Three?” Matt asked.
“The first vampires,” I said, jumping in before Lola could answer. “They created all of us.”
“But where did they come from?” Matt asked.
“No one knows. Where did the first humans come from? It’s the same kind of question.”
Matt looked at both of us, and then off to his right, considering. But he didn’t seem to have any more questions. At least not for now.
“So what do we do?” I asked, finally, wanting to bring the conversation back to the strange man.
“About the guy?” Lola said.
“Yeah. I don’t like that he’s out there. And that he knows my name.”
“I don’t think we do anything. There’s nothing to do. We wait until he pops up again.”
And that was exactly what I was afraid of. Him popping up inside my apartment or cornering me in some alley somewhere.
But Lola was right. There wasn’t anything to do. Nothing I could think of anyway.
Well, there was one thing.
He seemed to know that I liked nightlife and didn’t know anything about Matt (I was assuming). Maybe I should put myself out there as bait. Wait for him to come to me again. He did seem interested. Although, interested in what I wasn’t sure.
I watched as Lola turned her head quickly and moved her eyes off to her right, like a light bulb had just gone off in her head.
“What is it?” I asked.
“We could go talk to Raven.”
Raven. That was a name I didn’t like to hear. The woman gave me the creeps, and that was very unusual for me. Not to mention, she was a vampire just like us, and no more or less powerful. There was just something for me about being in her presence...
“You think she might know something?”
“Raven know
s a lot of things.”
“Is she here?”
Lola unfocused her eyes a second, searching, and then returned fully to the room.
“Yeah.”
I rubbed my forehead and looked at Lola, who knew how I felt about Raven.
“Come on, Vic. What do we have to lose?”
I hesitated a moment longer, but ultimately I trusted Lola on this one.
“Okay, let’s go. But not tonight, tomorrow night. I need some time to prepare.”
“You know, tomorrow night is a lunar eclipse. Raven may be... celebrating or worshiping or whatever she does.”
“Great,” I said, “as if I wasn’t already freaked out enough.”
“Pick another night then.”
“No, we’ll go tomorrow night,” I said, even though I didn’t want to.
My intuition had told me tomorrow night, and that’s what I would stick with.
5
“Who’s Raven?” Matt asked me on the way back to my apartment.
“A friend of Lola’s,” I said and rolled my eyes.
Matt looked at me, amused.
“You don’t like her?”
“No,” I said and didn’t elaborate any further although I knew that wouldn’t stop Matt from asking.
“Why?”
I thought about this and wasn’t exactly sure how to answer. The truth was that I had only met Raven a few times, and that was plenty.
She was a thousand years old, which made her somewhat middle aged, although younger middle aged, in the vampire world, and Lola had known her since before we were friends.
If you could imagine a witch who is also a vampire, that would be Raven. But she wasn’t actually a witch, as there was no such thing, but she had a rare gift that most vampires just referred to as magic.
The names for different gifts were often just descriptive of the gift itself and got passed around from vampire to vampire. Oftentimes they would be translations of translations, meaning they may sound a little odd in one language, just because they had originated in another and then got translated a few times.
Also, they went in and out of fashion. A name for one gift in one century may change in the next. It was a very organic process and made for some interesting descriptors.
Anyway, back to Raven—she fed and roamed the night, just like any other vampire, but Raven could also make things...happen, which was ultimately what made me feel so uncomfortable around her, I think.
It wasn’t that she cast spells or used potions or anything like that, but she could...move things, arrange things so that they happened in a way that was suddenly visible to you, in a way that you wanted them to happen.
Like if you wanted to find someone.
Magics were also closely connected with natural phenomena. A lunar eclipse, for instance, and almost always animals. But they were also pretty rare. The fact that we had one in this city was unusual, but also an asset.
Although many vampires, just like me, tended to be uneasy around magics, so I would imagine it was somewhat unusual for Raven to be asked for anything.
Lola, however, seemed completely unaffected by Raven and her gift. If anything, she was curious.
I answered Matt’s question as best I could, but he still looked confused. I would definitely take him with us tomorrow night so he could see for himself. Otherwise I was ready to stop thinking about Raven and what she might have for us tomorrow night. And I was especially ready to stop thinking about our mystery man and where he might be hiding. Though that seemed to stick to my mind like chewed up gum underneath a table. I was agitated.
We got back to my apartment, and I poured us a couple of drinks and then headed into the living room where Matt was lounging on the couch. He opened his arms in invitation to me and I lay down with him after setting the drinks on the table.
As we lay there together, and Matt’s hands began to roam my body, there flashed into my mind an image of the man in the weird hat and coat, the knowledge that he was my creator and our upcoming visit to Raven that not even Matt starting to undress me could fully erase.
6
The night was clear, but there were no stars. None that we could see from the city anyway.
Matt, Lola and I sat in a cab as it bore us through small, labyrinthine streets, heading to the outskirts where Raven lived.
Actually, she lived enough outside of the city where it almost seemed as if she lived in the country. Once you left city limits, nature encroached fast, and I suspected that’s the way she liked it.
Vampires almost always lived in urban areas. There were several reasons for this, but first of all, already high homicide rates concealed the blood drinking population better than a small town or suburb would. Raven’s gift simply predisposed her to want to live near natural surroundings. Her dwelling gave her the best of both worlds.
Lola had told her we were coming earlier in the day, and I got the sense there was something she didn’t want to tell me about her conversation with Raven.
I figured I was already uncomfortable enough, so whatever it was wouldn’t really matter. I would just find out when I got there.
The cab stopped, and we were at the end of a long driveway. I had never actually been to Raven’s house. The few times I had met her had always been elsewhere, though it seemed that, of late, Raven was only leaving her house to feed and not much else, or so Lola told me.
Lola paid the cab driver and I suddenly wondered why we hadn’t just driven ourselves out here. If something happened, we were stuck. I mean, we could always call another cab but that would take time. I didn’t relish the idea of being trapped in Raven’s territory, but it was too late now.
We walked along the gravely driveway, with trees on either side of us, so it felt something like a tunnel. And let me assure you, there was no light at the end of this one, only darkness.
Raven’s home came into view and I thought it was a good thing that it was concealed from the road.
Her home, from the outside, looked like a table with too many knickknacks on it. It was older, a little unkempt, with strange objects set forth in the grass and on the walkways. Overgrown plants and grasses grew up the walls and in the flower beds, so that it looked like the house was being pulled underground by the forces of nature.
Lola walked up to the door and knocked on the screen door, which was the only door that was closed. The front door was wide open so we could see into the dim interior of her house and smell woody odors coming from the inside.
Soon, a creaky voice like an old chair called out to us.
“Come in.”
Lola pulled the handle of the door and walked inside. Matt followed behind her and I followed behind him. We were in the belly of the beast.
“Raven? Where are you?” Lola called out as the three of us made our way between old furniture, more odd objects and curtains that hung between rooms where doors should have been.
It was dark, like there was a light in only one of the rooms of the house, and all the other rooms had to share the light that emanated from that one room.
Finally, we found her in the kitchen.
She sat at the kitchen table in a chair that looked like it could have sold for two dollars at a yard sale, all vinyl and metal. The other chairs at the table looked equally shabby and all were unmatched.
Raven sat, hunched, her collarbone and shoulders very pronounced through the shirt she wore. Her hair was messy (as usual) and she held a cigarette between two long fingers, and flicked the ash off the end with a motion practiced for a millennium.
She did not look at any of us as we entered the room.
“Terrible things. Terrible things,” she said as we stood around her kitchen waiting for her to address us.
Lola glanced back at me as if to indicate this was what worried her about their conversation earlier.
“Raven, what is it?” Lola asked.
“The order. The order is off.”
“What order?” Lola asked, and I was really
glad she felt comfortable enough to do the talking.
“The order of everything. Terrible things. Terrible things.”
She raised the cigarette to her mouth and inhaled. Then she flicked more ash at the ashtray, her bony fingers never skipping a beat.
“Raven, we need your help,” Lola said.
“I cannot help when the order is so badly ruined.”
“I don’t understand. We need to find someone. We need you to help us. Can you help us?”
Raven leapt up from her seat at the table and looked as if she might snap something on her body.
“I CANNOT HELP!” she yelled. Then settling down, she spoke again. “I have no power when the order is not right.”
She finally looked at all three of us, as if she just realized we were in the room, and her eyes became bright when they settled on me.
“Victoria,” she said, and I hated the way she said my name. “I’ve missed you.”
Wish I could say the same, I thought, but instead I said, “I’ve been busy.”
“Ha,” Raven said, and it came out somewhere between a laugh and a gasp, “as busy as any vampire.”
She smiled and all I could see was a skull.
Her eyes settled on Matt next and she walked toward him with a speed I didn’t know she had.
“So new,” she said and stroked his arm. “Speed.”
I had forgotten that she could almost always tell another vampire’s gift just from touching them.
Her momentary delight with Matt dissipated as she scowled once again and began muttering to herself.
“Terrible things...terrible things...”
“Raven...what’s happened?” Lola asked, and as much as my curiosity was aroused, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
Raven shut her eyes and tilted her head down as she finally dropped her cigarette into the ashtray and left it there to burn to the filter.
“There is a stain,” she said, and I had never heard her voice sound so clear and powerful, as if it arose from somewhere deep in her gut.
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