Twice Bitten

by Diana Greenbird

  By the time the last student filed in, the chair beside me was the only empty seat. I knew who was about to sit down before I looked up. Like I had sensed him on the field, my body ached as he neared.

  When my eyes eventually slid up from my notebook, the face looking at me wasn’t human. The white of his skin was unnaturally perfect and blemish-free, like an airbrushed model. The pull of his sky-blue t-shirt across his wide shoulders and toned biceps was a sign of his physical strength in an almost effortless illusion. The line of his jaw and sharp cheekbones was otherworldly beautiful like Adonis. But it was his lips which drew me in; curved into a closed-mouth attractive smirk.

  It wasn’t until he opened his mouth slightly, to introduce himself, that the tips of his canines could be seen, and a cold chill swept throughout my body.

  For when I said “wasn’t human”, I wasn’t talking in metaphor. I meant it quite literally. And those were no ordinary canine teeth. They were fangs.

  The boy who sat next to me in class – was a vampire.

  *

  When the monsters broke into the little brown house, the girl was asleep in her bedroom. She’d grown old enough not to wake up in the middle of the night and crawl into the man and woman’s bed. But tonight, something felt wrong.

  The woman had always told the girl that if she had a nightmare, she should focus on the nightlight by her bed. The light would protect her from any monsters. But the light was out.

  The girl crept from her bed and opened the door to the landing. The woman and the man weren’t in their beds. The door to their room was still open, their bed made.

  The girl tiptoed towards the stairs. There she heard the strange voices and the sound of the woman sobbing.

  Though the girl was frightened, she kept going. One by one, she stepped down the stairs until she was at the bottom. When the turned to the living room that is when she saw them.

  The monsters looked like beautiful creatures at first. Like the people on the television, or in the glossy magazines the woman read whilst she had her hair done. But as the girl continued to look, the glamour around them dissolved. Their skin sunk to their cheeks, hollow, like living skeletons. And the colour from their hair faded, until it was a dull lifeless white, like their skin.

  A sob broke out from the girl’s chest, and the monsters turned towards her. They flickered in and out of view, moving too fast for her little eyes to catch them.

  One monster held her from behind. Its skin was cold. Not like ice, not freezing, but cool to the touch.

  Too frightened to hear beyond the sobs erupting from her little body, wracking her whole self in shivers, the girl didn’t hear the words the monsters taunted the woman with.

  The last memory the girl had of that particular moment, was the look of the monster’s face as she snapped the man’s neck – and then the sharp pain in her neck, and the feeling of warm blood running down her chest, soaking into her nightgown.

  3

  As much as one could run with crutches and a cast on their leg, I ran in that moment in time. I left my bag – possibly my sanity – in that science room and didn’t look back.

  I tried to find an exit, but the maze of classrooms and corridors trapped me in my panic. The closest place I could find to hide was the girls’ restroom. I shut the door behind me, barring it with the metal bin that would obviously do nothing if the vampire decided to come and finish the job the monsters of my childhood had left unfinished twelve years ago.

  Being in the restroom wasn’t enough. I felt too exposed, too open here. I shut myself into one of the cubicles, locking the door for good measure. My crutches clattered to the floor as I sank onto the toilet seat.

  My breathing was erratic, my heartbeat a thunder inside my chest. My cheeks were flushed, and I could feel the sting of tears pushing to get out.

  This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t real. This couldn’t be happening.

  My thoughts spiralled as I unconsciously touched the scar on my neck. The metal of my many rings was soothing – a form of protection I always had with me – as it touched the raised skin. It had distorted a little over time. As I grew, the perfectly round crescent shape of the teeth that had dug into my neck had shifted and moved, looking almost like a tear in silvery scar tissue. Most people assumed that I’d been attacked by a dog as a child. The cops who had taken the homicide of my parents had assumed so, too, even when there’d been no evidence of an animal at the crime scene.

  I’d mentioned the monsters twice in my life. Once to my grandma before she told me everything was going to be alright. I had been a child. It had been my grandma’s belief that I was seeing monsters instead of men because the truth was too horrifying for a child to understand: that ordinary humans could be evil creatures, too.

  For eight years, I had almost begun to believe that lie. That the monsters were nothing more than a child’s justification. Until a woman had spotted the mark on my neck when I was thirteen and told me to come with her – that I belonged to a select few who knew the truth about a world hidden in the shadows. The thought of Ali snapped me out of my panic attack. Not gradually, but suddenly. Impossibly, one minute I was in the centre of despair, and then the next I was out. Like, somehow, I was able to push that fear and lock it in a box so that whilst I knew I had been panicking moments before, I felt entirely separate from that version of myself now.

  This was real. This was happening. And I wasn’t a powerless child who had no control anymore. I wasn’t alone. I had connections. And there was a Code.

  Maybelle drilled me with questions when I slid into her car. I’d waited in the restroom for the entirety of the last period and only left when I was sure no more students remained in the classroom – most of all the vampire. I’d grabbed my bag from where I’d left it in the science block and waited for Maybelle to pick me up where she’d promptly asked a million and one things about how my first day had gone.

  I fiddled with my rings as I nodded and uh-huh-ed like I was paying any attention to what she was telling me.

  ‘I was thinking of making risotto for dinner,’ Maybelle said. ‘What do you think?’

  She pulled the car into the drive.

  ‘I’m not really hungry. Maybe just call me down for a small portion,’ I said, trying not to brush her off too hard. I didn’t want to make an enemy of her. Or make her worry more. God, this woman was a hoverer.

  ‘Okay, honey,’ she said, carrying my bag in for me. ‘Have you got much homework to catch up on?’

  ‘Tons,’ I said. ‘The whole first week of final year missed. I’ll just be up in my room getting right on that.’

  As soon as I shut my bedroom door, I collapsed on my bed, looking up at the ceiling (not seeing anything of my surroundings I was so caught up in my own thoughts), homework completely forgotten.

  There was a vampire in my high school. A vampire. In high school. I might not exactly have been amid a panic attack like back in the toilets, but I was still freaking out at the strangeness, the utter shock, of the situation that I now found myself in.

  The fact stood: vampires didn’t just turn up at high school. At least, not in the real world. You consider vampires in modern books and pop-culture and all they seem to be doing is popping up in schools willie-nillie like it’s completely normal.

  In some books it made sense: House of Night and Vampire Academy, they were literally schools for vampires – but Twilight and Vampire Diaries?

  Answer me this, if you ask anyone past the age of eighteen whether they would choose to return to high school, would they honestly say yes? Even if nostalgia played a big factor for them, would they actually stick around longer than a day before they remembered what a complete crap-cluster high school was?

  As much as us kids believed high school was all there was to the world: there was a lot more going on outside those hallowed educational halls. Travelling the world; discovering lost treasure; dedicating your whole life to visit every nightclub ironically named The Basement
or The Club or something similarly as moronic… anything was better than sitting in a classroom filled with hormonal teens.

  Vampires – creatures who lived exceptionally long lifespans – even if they were turned when they were a teenager, surely, could pass for an adult? That didn’t really slide as an excuse for them to sit through the same classes year after year. If they could test out of a grade – they would end up testing their way out of school all the way to a doctorate with the amount of knowledge they’d be able to memorise from a lifetime of classes.

  Plus, vampires had heightened senses. Why would you go to a place that reeked of pubescent teenage sweat, where you had to look at the close-up shots of seriously bad acne, and hormones and gossip permeated the air like a bad miasma?

  Which led me to my question: what was the vampire doing at school? If he was at school, it meant he’d created an alias, and a backstory. That took time. That took effort. And if there was a reason he was here, I wanted to find out what.

  But before I did that, the very first thing I needed to do was find out whether this vamp – unusual as it was that he was at a high school – was following the Code or had gone rogue.

  My thirteen-year-old self’s intro to vamp-101 had gone like this:

  Vampires are real. Most things in the myth have a grain of truth in them. Silver hurts them, but not crosses or holy water. They can walk in the day, but it takes a lot of energy for them to keep up a vamp-glamour in direct sunlight, so they tend to avoid sunny states.

  Vampires must feed at least three times a week on live human blood to survive – no substitute will work. Just like you can’t have a blood transplant with someone who’s not your blood-type or animal blood.

  And vampires must follow the Code.

  The Code is simple: Don’t let humans know what you are. Don’t draw unnecessary attention to yourself. Don’t kill unless you have to.

  The vampires who had killed my parents had gone “rogue”. They had broken the Code for whatever sick reason twisted the minds of people sometimes and they’d taken the life of two humans as well as fed on me (feeding on children was also a no-no, just like you couldn’t expect a child to donate blood considering the dangers due to their young age).

  It’s why I’d been told that although my history with vampires was literally the worst, I shouldn’t expect the next vampire I met to be the whole nine yards of murder and evil. But as much as you could tell yourself and prepare, that didn’t equate to what it was like being face to face with a creature that should only exist in mythology. Especially when it was a trigger for my PTSD over witnessing my parents’ murder.

  I tried to tell myself repeatedly not to be ashamed of how I reacted: my feelings were valid, and emotions demanded to be felt, you couldn’t bury them. But shame was a hard thing to take control over.

  In the last twelve years of my life since I’d seen my first vampire, I’d gone through a lot of experiences with Death and I thought that had built up enough internal strength and mental fortitude for me to be able to deal with anything. It was embarrassing to realise that there were still some things out there that could melt me into a pathetic flan.

  It almost felt like karma for me being a bitch to Lawrence about how scared he’d acted around Emma. Everyone had their fears. Just because what frightened you might not affect another person, didn’t make their fear less valid.

  A quote from some rags-to-riches story I’d read in the newspaper once came back to me. Thinking will not overcome fear, but action will.

  I could ruminate over why this vamp was in school, whether I was going to be a pitiful ball of slime the next time I saw him and completely break apart – but that wasn’t going to change what would happen in the future. Thinking was only dwelling on the fear and building it up into something more. The only way I could get over this once and for all was to act on it – and then I’d know for certain.

  I pulled myself up from my bed and got out my homework. I wasn’t going to think about the vamp until tomorrow morning, I told myself. I was going to have a normal night.

  But I knew it was a lie even as I thought it. I spent every second writing my homework focusing on the deep brown eyes of the Adonis-looking creature and the curve of that wicked smile before he’d flashed me his fangs.

  Maybelle drove me to school the next morning. I spent the drive giving myself a mental lecture. I was going to sit through class like a normal person. I wasn’t going to confront the vampire or making a scene. I needed to test out whether he was adhering to the Code or not, but since I didn’t have any plan in mind how to do that, the best thing was just to avoid him the best I could. When I faced him… I just needed to make sure that I could remain collected enough so that simply seeing him didn’t trigger another panic attack.

  But like all my plans and good intentions, as soon as it went to putting them into motion, the Universe threw a cog in the works and every planned thought went out of my mind.

  I was watching Maybelle’s car drive off and checking my timetable when I felt an invisible chord tug deep in my chest. Like the way I had sensed him before I’d seen him in science class, and how my eyes had constantly been drawn to him as he played baseball, that feeling once again returned now.

  My head looked in the direction the chord pulled me, and I spotted him immediately. The vampire was waiting outside the main building by the school parking lot, over by the picnic tables. He was alone, checking his phone occasionally like he was waiting for someone.

  There weren’t many people around, all the students filing off into the school. I did notice that he was garnering a lot of looks from the opposite sex like before, when the girls had been watching him intensely in gym.

  I took my time (honestly, it wasn’t like I had a choice with the crutches and all) making my way over to him. Any panic I felt building up in my stomach I tried to distract by telling myself the facts. It was daylight. There were witnesses. We were in a school. I was wearing my rings. I wasn’t going into this unprepared. Besides preternatural speed and strength, the vampire didn’t have anything on me. I also had the element of surprise on my side: even though I’d given it away, I was a human who knew he was a vampire. That had to be unnerving to him since the only ones who knew how to spot them worked for the same organisation as Ali who policed them. I was going to be fine.

  He saw me coming. His eyebrows seemed to meet in the middle for a moment, furrowed in confusion, before he smoothed out his expression and gave me a wry smile.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. One thickly accented word and my body seemed to melt. Not in the way it had when panic had taken over, but something… worse, I supposed. It melted like it would if I was attracted to him. Like I was one of those giggling girls who looked up at him through long eyelashes and hoped he’d give me the time of day.

  I refused to listen to my body. It was more than just the pull I had felt the first time I’d seen him. This was biological. Vampiric. The glamour they used to entice their prey and trick your eye so you no longer saw their true form, but the one they would have once held if they were still living.

  I stopped in front of him, staring. I didn’t mean to – stare that is. But I was human, and it was difficult stopping the natural reaction my body had to his. I wanted to see if by focusing my attention on his features I could somehow cut through that glamour to reveal the creature beneath. I’d seen their true face before, when I was a child. Beautiful one moment and then monstrous the next. This vampire wasn’t like that. No matter how hard I looked, he remained beautiful. At least I hadn’t dissolved into a panic. My breathing was normal, even if I could hear that my heartbeat was pretty strong in my chest.

  ‘Do we have a problem, love?’ he asked.

  He was British, or at least he was putting on a British accent if he wasn’t. It seemed like a silly detail to add to a backstory if it wasn’t natural. Why would you draw any more unnecessary attention?

  His voice was low and velvety. Like with his looks, it was distracting
. I didn’t know much about different dialects or accents in England, but if I did, I would have been able to identify the Worcestershire enunciation.

  ‘Love?’ he said again. “Luhv” it sounded like. He quirked an eyebrow. ‘Are you going to speak or just stare at me?’

  I didn’t register that he was speaking to me, not really. I was still trying to see through the glamour. It felt weird. The chord that had drawn me to him was something I was unnaturally hyperaware of, as if I could feel his presence more than anything else around me. The haze of his glamour was like a soft lighting filter, with an added jolt of hormones.

  ‘Have you got a camera on your phone? I could model for you if you’d prefer?’

  That snapped me out of the trance. For the first time I registered what he said. Cocky son of a bitch.

  It was more embarrassing to be caught feeling these unnatural things I towards him, than imagining what I must have looked like yesterday running away in terror. It took all of that one cocky little statement for my mind to switch from: this is a vampire who could kill me, to: this is a teenage boy who really needs to be put in his damn place.

  It also cleared my mind on how exactly I was going to test whether he was adhering to the Code. The phrase kill two birds with one stone, popped into my head right before I stopped holding my right crutch, pulled my hand into a tight fist and punched as hard as I possibly could into the side of his jaw.

  My first thought was ow. Hitting a vampire hurt a thousand times more than hitting an ordinary human. My second thought was yes! Because I wasn’t the only one in pain. It would have been mightily embarrassing if this had only hurt one of us. Of course, my plan would work just the same if it didn’t hurt him. That hadn’t really been the aim. The aim would be to see his reaction.

  The vampire rocked back on his heels for a second, trying to regain his posture after being pushed back by my punch. He touched his cheek tenderly, then looked me dead in the eye.