Twice Bitten

by Diana Greenbird

  Martha, Jenny and Robbie shared a smile with each other.

  I was saved from having to recall another quote from memory as Emerson and Gi finally entered the auditorium. As they walked up the aisle to the stage, I could see that Emerson had his laptop bag slung over his shoulder. He’d been in his locker then. I wonder if he knew about his car, yet.

  ‘Seriously, Emerson, what’s up?’

  ‘Nothing, just drop it,’ Emerson told Gi as he threw down his bag at the foot of the stage and slouched into the front row seat.

  Martha seemed pleased he’d chosen to sit with her. I had a sneaking suspicion it was because sitting up on the stage would have required being close to me.

  ‘What’s up?’ Jenny asked, concerned, looking between Emerson and Gi.

  ‘I don’t know. He won’t tell me,’ Gi said pointedly.

  Emerson might not have said anything, but he certainly gave me one hell of a stink eye. Martha noticed.

  ‘Trouble in paradise?’ Martha asked. She hadn’t been pleased when Jenny had romanticised how Emerson carried my books to class and took time out of baseball practice to come talk to me.

  Neither me nor Emerson deigned that with a response, both of us glaring at her.

  ‘Jeez, touchy much?’ Martha said, as though we’d hurt her with a look. ‘It was just a question. It’s not like any of us actually know what’s going on with you two anyway. Are you dating or what?’

  ‘We’re not dating,’ Emerson said, his tone flat, at the same time I practically screeched, ‘are we what?’

  ‘Told you,’ Robbie said to Jenny. Maybe she’d been romanticising it a lot then.

  ‘Well, he’s not showed any interest to any other girl since school started, has he?’ Jenny said, defending herself. ‘I mean, have you?’

  Martha watched intently for Emerson’s response. He just looked at Jenny like she’d grown another head or something. ‘We’re not dating,’ he pointedly repeated.

  ‘We hardly even know each other,’ I added. ‘Don’t you think it would be a bit insane if we were?’

  Gi didn’t look like she believed me. At least about us not knowing each other. She still seemed under the impression that we’d met before, like I was the fourth member of their vampiric trio.

  Gi never got a chance to voice any of those thoughts, though, as Emerson got up from his chair and grabbed his bag, clearly enraged by my simple response.

  ‘You’re right,’ Emerson said. ‘We don’t know each other. And you’re so bloody adamant to keep it that way since you’d rather do anything than talk to me.’

  His eyes lingered on my bag, like he, too, could hear the tell-tale heart of the page I’d ripped from his sketchpad.

  His anger appeared out of nowhere to everyone else in the room, but had been a simmering thing between us since I’d seen him walk down the aisle with his laptop. I guess he knew about his car, then. And the stolen sketch.

  ‘I’m going to have lunch with Grayson. Sorry,’ he said to Gi. ‘Text you later.’

  ‘So… they’re not dating but he wants to, and she doesn’t?’ Jenny said, trying to figure it out.

  ‘Not everything is about love and romance, Jen,’ Gi said, shaking her head.

  ‘I mean, I agree,’ Martha said, ‘but this was totally about Liv, wasn’t it?’

  The auditorium doors slammed shut as Emerson left. The AA Team winced. Gi and Jenny gave her a “shut up” look.

  ‘Because it’s totally ordinary considering all the other times he skipped having lunch with us before her?’ Martha said, defensively.

  They couldn’t argue with that. And neither could I, though I wouldn’t admit Emerson going to hang out with his own kind was a much better result than I’d hoped for, despite Emerson’s continuing relationship with Gi who he’d “text later”.

  We had maths class after lunch. Once again, I was stuck with Emerson, but thankfully, like art class, he was in the desk behind me, rather than next to me. I could tell, just at the stride of his walk as he came through the door, that he wasn’t going to remain silent about what I’d done.

  ‘I said we could talk,’ Emerson whispered to the back of my head when the teacher had begun speaking, their back to us as they wrote on the whiteboard.

  I ignored him.

  ‘Why did you break into my car? What are you trying to find?’

  He kicked the back of my chair when I wouldn’t respond. I turned around and gave him an evil stare.

  ‘Someone broke into your car – how awful,’ I said in a monotone voice. ‘Did they take anything?’

  ‘No. They moved stuff. Why would they do that?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sounds like a dumb prank to me.’

  ‘Dumb would be right.’

  ‘I want it back, by the way,’ Emerson said.

  ‘What back?’

  ‘The sketch you ripped from my pad. I want it back.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘But if I did… if we were talking about the one you drew of me in art class the other day. You’re not getting that back.’

  ‘You didn’t have a right to take that.’

  ‘You didn’t have the right to draw me without permission.’

  Emerson just kicked my chair one last time, but I ignored him for the rest of the class.

  I’d like to say that I didn’t feel some smug sense of pride as Emerson drove away from the car lot with a smashed window after school, but I wasn’t a big person and it did kind of tickle me. I even had the audacity to wave him goodbye when he drove past me as Maybelle pulled up.

  ‘Who was that you were waving to?’ she asked me as I slid into the car.

  ‘One of Gi’s friends,’ I said.

  ‘He’s one of the new boys, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘His back window was smashed.’

  ‘Was it? That’s not very safe for him to be driving around with a smashed window. I hope he’s going to get that fixed.’

  Maybelle nodded in agreement before her usual after-school chatter began.

  6

  The first thing I did when I got back to my bedroom was check my emails and load up Cassidy Grimm’s document. I hadn’t been certain what I would find on there, but boy was it the jackpot, even if it was the unexpected kind.

  I started with the smallest PDF file. It was a scan of a handwritten note, rather than the type-writer sheets of the later pages. The scan of the page was in black and white, but from the staining of the page I could see that it was pretty old.

  Cassidy Grimm was the name of a scientist from the twentieth century who used the Second World War as a cover for her secret experiments regarding the lamia species within the Blood World.

  Dr Grimm believed that it was her duty as a scientist, and as a human being, to find out about the creatures that had existed in our world for millennia going undetected; writing many papers on her findings.

  The Order of the Cross first approached her nearing the end of the Second World War, vis-à-vis her lamia studies, believing in the potential for application of Blood World biology to human technology and warfare.

  It was in this time period that the lamia of the Blood World had slowly begun to ingratiate themselves into the upper echelons of society, controlling the human population from the top down, rather than remaining hidden as they had hereunto done. The Order of the Cross sought to limit this power, as well as keep the secret of the existence of the lamia from the rest of the world’s population as their founders had been tasked with.

  During the final two years of the war, the Order of the Cross employed her to hasten her experimental findings, specifically to the powers and weaknesses of the Blood World lamia. Possibly for the use of lamia as super-soldiers. It was only as the war ended that the Order realized that Dr Grimm was experimenting on living creatures rather than cadavers as previously assumed.

  After she was arrested by the police, the Order stripped her laboratory of all her findings, burning i
t to the ground. Her notes, however, were saved.

  Dr Grimm’s fate was far worse than just being stripped of her title as a doctor. Believed to be working for the Nazis (though she showed no affiliation), Grimm was tried with the other doctors who had experimented upon the concentration camp prisoners. She was sentenced to death soon after her trial.

  Dr Cassidy Grimm starts her findings off with a personal letter to the Order.

  Her notes on each of her subjects change over time. In the beginning Grimm believes there must be a scientific explanation for everything. By the end, her frustrations become evident, until she states there are simply things beyond the human understanding.

  It is said that maybe at the end of her experiments, she truly did start to believe in the magic of the Blood World.

  The Blood World was already a term I knew. But the Order? They sounded like the people Ali worked for. I knew they must have been around for a long time, but it was strange to think of them working as far back as fifty years… though come to think of it, they probably existed long before if they’d been tasked with keeping such a big secret from most of the population.

  The term “lamia” I didn’t understand. But I had a feeling it would become clear if I kept on reading.

  I clicked on the next PDF. It had moved on from the handwritten notes and were scans of Cassidy’s experiment journal – or whatever they wanted to call it.

  Told from the oral history of the lamia:

  Before the Iron Age, as the Homosapien warred against the Neanderthal, another creature slowly developed in the shadows.

  At first, they were thought to be spiritually minded humans: medicine men, shamans, advisors to tribal leaders. They ingratiated themselves within human society, for at this time, the humans did not know they were any different from them. But they were. Not simply in a spiritual way, but down to their very biology.

  The powers these creatures – self named the lamia – possessed were like that of the gods. Later, in Archaic Greece, the lamia were worshipped and regarded sacred. It is believed that the stories of the Greek gods walking among their human subjects such as Homer wrote in the Iliad was based upon the lamia of the Classical period. This continued into the Roman Empire where the lamia were referred to as Divine. So revered and protected, these creatures were given the best shelter, the best foods, and knew the secrets of nature to outlast the sicknesses and diseases that plagued the mere mortal.

  But, as Christianity began to sweep through the Empire and remove pagan worship, so too were the Divine unseated from their power. The lamia removed their laurel crowns and immersed themselves back into the shadows of society. But not all humans could forget of the existence of the Divine – those that had ruled over them.

  Hunters sought out the Divine, intent to either steal their power or rid the world of their evil – the final goal of the hunter depended on their location and upbringing. Most hunters were unsuccessful in their pursuit of the lamia, but during the latter centuries of the Byzantine Empire, a rare few hunters struck upon an avenue for success.

  It was known that the older generations of lamia were able to use their gifts to protect themselves from detection or harm, but the children of the lamia were defenceless until they came into their powers at eighteen. Using this tactic, hundreds of lamia children were wiped from existence.

  The largest coven of lamia in Germany, distraught over the deaths of their young, sought to find a cure for death and bring their offspring back to life.

  Their “cure” began with the reanimation of corpses – but that was only mimicry of life. The soul within remained dead. The vessel was simply a puppet for the witch to use as they wished. Over time, the lamia learnt that they could not cure death, but they might prevent it from being so easy for one to die in the first place.

  It was in these experiments the German coven gave birth to the first vampires. But these lamia, whilst stronger in almost every way – stronger than both witch and human alike – did not possess the supernatural gifts of their witch forbearers. Of the lamia, one could only possess preternatural power, or supernatural power – but never both.

  Later, the spell was adapted by a Russian coven so that all future lamia coming into their powers on their eighteenth birthday might have a choice between preternatural or supernatural gifts. But the coven had yet to know of the infection that was carried within the vampire’s blood – the thirst that would consume them and the new appetites their long-life required. Nor did they know of the danger of a vampire’s bite. For this was the beginning of “vampire” history, and the worst was still to come.

  The name “Divine” sent a jolt of recognition down my spine. I recalled the dream I’d had last night of the Divine, lamia, witches, whatever you wanted to call them and the hunt which had begun during the time of the Black Death by a new breed of mortal hunters.

  Monstrous Divine were clearly vampires. If this oral tale had any truth to it, then it meant that witches were the origin of the species and had created vampires through spell craft.

  Had Ali ever referred to them as the Divine before? I felt like I would have remembered that shred of information – especially since I would have loudly protested the monsters who had killed my parents being anything god-like. So how had I known the term last night from my dream? That was entirely too weird.

  I tried to recall the pieces of my dream, but it was all but snippets now. I remembered the rotting smell of the streets, the call for “bring out your dead” and the shock of the first immune human when they had seen the true face of a vampire for the first time.

  The rest of the dream, as the vampires and witches realised they were about to become extinct as the hunters succeeded in their work, became hazy after that.

  I was a little pissed off at myself for not bothering with that dream journal idea now. If I had another dream like that, I was definitely going to write it down.

  I turned off the lamp on my beside table when Maybelle came in to tell me goodnight, but continued to read Cassidy’s research on my laptop. I read every page.

  By the end, you could see she had become the image of a mad scientist in search for answers no matter the cost of her own humanity. The depth of knowledge into the biology of the lamia was sickening once you realized how she’d come about it.

  The origins story stuck with me as I fell asleep that night. The evolution of man taken further than we’d believed. But it stuck with me not because it proved that witches and vampires were just a chromosome (or whatever it was that gave them more power) away from us. It was the way that Cassidy had written it. “The oral history of the lamia”.

  I could imagine a witch sitting down across the table with her – looking like any other ordinary human – and telling her the tale of her ancestors. How they had simply been born different, worshipped and then hunted because of it. And had sought to find a cure for death like so many humans still searched for today – though we called it prolonging life.

  The image of that witch stuck with me, right through to the end where Cassidy would get into the bone structure, the DNA molecules – how many heartbeats there were between the chest cavity being opened before death – in search for that spark of “magic”. Of a scientific explanation to the unexplainable.

  I’d thrown up my dinner when the scans had gotten to some of the images that remained of the corpses left behind from Cassidy’s experiments.

  The new breed of hunter continued to succeed where all other past hunters had failed. Their ability to see through the Glamour of the Monstrous Divine, and inability to be turned into one themselves, meant that none could hide their true form from them.

  With the human population infected, those vampires who were not hunted were still under threat of falling into death-like comas, for they could only feed on non-sick mortals. In these comas, the monstrous Divine were often mistaken for dead, and were buried in the mass plague pits, to live the remainder of their eternal life, half dead and surrounded by the rotting corpse
s of mortals.

  The combination of both these factors meant that the numbers of the Divine had dwindled so drastically in England, it was thought that from the thousands that had once existed, there were barely more than a hundred Divine left. Something had to be done to stop this madness. A world without Divine would be a world without magic.

  The Council of the Divine, along with the Order of the Cross, decided to make a drastic choice. They would select group of Divine, unbound from the Code, to be given specific instructions to assassinate the mortal hunters who were gunning for their extinction.

  Under normal circumstances, the Order would never agree to such a drastic upheaval of the rules to which the Divine were confined. The Code had been agreed to by the Divine and the Order in the Byzantine period. It was an immovable covenant that ensured that as long as the Divine did not use their gifts to enslave or kill humans, the Order would keep their existence a secret from all humans – especially those who hunted for them. But this was a desperate time.

  This special group of monstrous Divine, named the Mors Exercitus, were the last hope for all Divine creatures. It was the fear that after the hunters had rid England of their near-immortal creatures, they would sail to Europe and continue their extermination. The Mors Exercitus set about their task to find every last one of these immune mortals and rid the world of their evil so that the Divine may live in peace once more, hidden in the shadows.

  Without the Code to stop them, the Mors Exercitus were a brutal force to be reckoned with. They had been turned from Divine to creatures of the night with the sole purpose of ridding the world of the hunters – and so that became their only purpose in their afterlife.

  Amid the plague, a secret war waged on. Human hunters banded together – finding more mortals immune to the glamour of the Divine and increased their hunting parties. The Mors Exercitus tracked each family down – from those who were in the midst of the hunt, to those humans who had not yet joined the fight.

  Whilst the Mors Exercitus numbers remained the same, the immune hunters continued to change and adapt. More were born immune, but more still were killed by the Mors Exercitus. Humans bred faster than Divine, were more plentiful and these hunters proved tricker to kill than their un-evolved mortal predecessors. Just when the Mors Exercitus believed they had rid England of the last immune hunters, another family would be uncovered in the North or the South.