Gi unlocked the car and let me out. Thoroughly scolded, I walked to class in silence.
‘What’s up with you?’ Emerson asked when I slid into my seat next to him in science.
Emerson had his earphones around his neck, not plugged in like he usually did. He twirled his pen in his hand. I knew he wasn’t going to bother taking any notes despite its presence. I hadn’t seen him put pen to paper once during class – besides art. Though I knew he did do the occasional homework since I’d seen the proof on his laptop.
At the sound of Emerson’s voice, I could see the girls in the class lean forward and pay extra attention, eavesdropping on our conversation. The girls were still fan-clubbing around him, but since Emerson and I had begun our “truce”, it meant that they would break off swooning to stare daggers in the back of my head. I almost preferred it back when Emerson and I were ignoring each other, and the rest of the class didn’t even know that I existed.
‘Gi scolding me for messing with your heart.’
I didn’t know whether Emerson had admitted all that shit Gi had told me in confidence, but I wasn’t just about to go all high-school drama on Emerson.
Emerson didn’t look embarrassed, he just laughed it off. I wondered whether it had anything to do with him not being able to connect to that moment in the past because I hadn’t been there.
‘Yesterday she had a go at me. Apparently, we flirt and tease each other like kids in nursery and she expected us to be more mature about our feelings.’
‘I’m not flirting with you,’ I said.
‘Of course not, love.’
‘Kissing you was a mistake. It wasn’t an accumulation of sexual tension,’ I clarified for him. I tried to ignore the gasp as one of the girls overheard us. Jesus. Get your own life.
‘I totally believe you,’ Emerson said, but he had that smirk that said otherwise.
Our science teacher gave me an annoyed glance between lecturing. I mimed zipping my mouth – since Emerson wasn’t going to get a telling off. I pretended to focus on writing notes.
‘But for the record I was,’ Emerson whispered. ‘Flirting with you. I can switch to outright complimenting your beauty if that’s more obvious to you. But our verbal sparring seems to be something you’re more comfortable with.’
‘Eff off,’ I hissed back at him. He chuckled once more, like I’d just proved his point, and I intently paid attention to what our teacher was saying and not how the bond felt tight between us like it would physically pull me into his lap if it had any control.
I stayed focused in class until I got a message on my phone from Ali. She’d finally found time to track down my car. Looks like I was going to find my Porsche after school today. I didn’t exactly have high hopes about the state it would be in considering I’d lost it weeks ago. I was surprised the GPS still worked. Knowing Ali, it probably hadn’t, and she’d had to use security cameras or some other shit to find out where Emma had taken it.
‘What are you doing after school today?’ I said, turning towards Emerson.
‘You?’
‘That was not an effing invite to get in my pants.’ I clenched my fists tight, trying to remember that Emerson was now a friend and I shouldn’t punch him in the face for being a cocky, arrogant prick. ‘That’s really how you think I’d proposition you?’
Emerson, infuriatingly, just shrugged. ‘What do you need me for, love?’
‘A ride.’ Emerson raised an eyebrow like he was going to make another joke. ‘Don’t even think about it.’
Asking Emerson to help find my car probably wasn’t the greatest decision if I wanted to prove to him that I wasn’t into spending more time with him and all that. After our kiss, I probably should have been keeping a distance. But really, Emerson was my only option in this one. It wasn’t like I could simply ask Gi for a ride like I usually would.
I had no idea what state my car would be, or what the area was going to be like where we eventually found it. Something told me Emma wasn’t exactly going to abandon it in the local area where we had the type of people to report stranded vehicles. It was more likely I’d find it in a district that I was used to in my previous homes – not a place I ever expected Gi to venture to.
It had been nearly two months since Death had paid me a visit, and I didn’t like the chances of him coming to see me when Gi was around. Spending time with the AA Team at lunch, rehearsals or even the odd shopping trip I could risk – since Emerson was there and technically that meant that they were putting themselves in danger anyway. (Though lately I’d stopped being able to convince myself of that since nothing about Emerson in the past few weeks had even hinted that he was dangerous). But a bad area, abandoned car and only me for company? Yeah, that was like hand delivering a calligraphed invite to Death’s waiting hand. So, Emerson it was.
‘I love how freely you’re willing to risk my life,’ Emerson said.
‘We’re picking my car up, not going to a drug bust,’ I said in the passenger seat of his car.
‘Then why are you making me feel like I should have a gun on me?’ Emerson asked.
His hands were relaxed on the steering wheel, so I didn’t put too much stock into his fake worry. But it was odd how he was able to pick up how I was feeling. I wanted to attribute it to pure coincidence, but I wondered whether part of the bond between us somehow made him able to sense it…
‘Do you know how to shoot a gun?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Emerson said.
‘Do you have a gun?’
‘No.’
‘Do you need a gun?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘Then stop complaining, shut up and turn right when you reach the end of the street.’
We found my car abandoned on a street that looked like even a wave of gentrification couldn’t fix its problems. We were over in the next town, the complete opposite to where we currently lived. If their high school had a pool – it was probably due to the ceiling caving in after a heavy downpour. The houses had chain link fences between them; paint peeling from the doors; windows that used the shutters, since the glass had been smashed through with bricks, and lawns with deep track marks from cars that had swerved off the road and mounted the pavement so far they’d gone onto people’s property. Basically, like half of the foster homes I’d spent my youth in.
The wheels had been taken from my car, the hood removed, every last window smashed and I could already tell from stepping out of Emerson’s car that they’d set fire to the insides – though it hadn’t caught as well as they’d wanted since only the front seats were burnt to hell.
‘Makes your smashed window look like small potatoes now, doesn’t it?’ I said to Emerson.
‘You’re going to need a tow,’ he said.
I shook my head. ‘Forget it. It’s just a car.’
As much as I didn’t have money for a new ride, I didn’t have the cash to fix this one, either. I especially didn’t want to even look at the car again when I saw what had been spray painted onto the sides. Cock tease.
It wasn’t the usual graffiti people tagged on an abandoned car. No, this was a message from Emma. A reminder that she hadn’t just read whatever the newspaper had reported on what happened between Christian and my foster dad – but she’d somehow used her dad’s cop connections and found access to Christian’s interrogation tapes.
‘Just take me home,’ I said.
‘Did Emma write that?’ Emerson asked.
He’d seen the change in my demeanour since I’d spotted the spray paint. It was impossible to lie to him, or to deny what he’d seen. It was a lucky guess that Emma had been the one to leave that message for me – but, like I’d said, it wasn’t the usual graffiti that people tagged on abandoned cars, and Emma had been the one to take my Porsche.
‘Just take me home,’ I said again.
‘What happened between you and your foster family that you don’t want out?’ Emerson asked. ‘That’s what she’s threatening you with, isn’t it?’<
br />
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Liv-’
‘She’s trying to use my past to stop me from helping Gi. She thinks I give a shit about some stuff I learnt to get over a long time ago – enough that I’ll forget she’s trying to hurt my friend now. It doesn’t matter, Emerson. I don’t want to talk about it, so drop it.’
We drove back and I could tell Emerson was uncomfortable. He kept tapping on the wheel with his thumb, his leg shaking up and down when we stopped at a light.
‘Jesus, are you tweaking out or something? Stop with the constant jiggling.’
He stopped, becoming motionless. ‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘You’re not hungry, are you?’ I asked.
We’d never really talked about him feeding. I knew he had to, and he’d told me about managing his hunger, but the actual logistics of him getting blood we didn’t bring up.
‘If you need to scour the streets for your next unsuspecting victim, can you drop me off first?’ I said.
Emerson snorted. But then he looked at me. ‘Tell me you’re kidding,’ he said.
‘I’m half-kidding.’
‘Wait, you actually think we still feed on humans. Like bite them and drink their blood?’
‘You don’t?’
Emerson slammed the breaks on the car, and then pulled over and cut the engine. ‘This entire time you’ve been thinking that-’ Emerson stopped himself. His breathing had become erratic. ‘You said you were informed,’ he reminded me.
‘Where exactly is the misinformation that a vamp needs blood to survive?’
‘That’s not what I’m talking about. Vampires haven’t fed off humans since the late sixties. We have regular blood transfusions. What person in their right mind would attempt to bite a human in this day and age? And it’s not like we like the taste of blood. We just need it and that was nature’s way of transferring it from human to us.’
‘Transfusions, like with an IV?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you steal from a blood bank?’
‘No. We have our own source.’
I supposed the Order would oversee that. It wouldn’t take much for someone like Ali to set up a charity, with all those one-percenters sponsoring it, with blood drives etcetera for their vampirically inclined lamia friends.
‘Have you ever fed from a human directly?’ I asked.
It wasn’t some round-about way to guess his age. We’d already gone over that yesterday, but I was still intrigued to know when Emerson had been born and what his body had lived through. Part of me wanted to know if he’d made someone feel as I had done as a child: that pain, the fear…
‘Yes,’ he said.
So, he was over fifty years old… Fifty years of memories he no longer remembered. Of people and experiences he’d lost.
‘What was it like back then – before you had blood transfusions? How did you choose who to… feed on?’
His invitation for questions hadn’t expired. I knew he would prefer me to ask rather than remain uninformed. Some novels and films had vampires with the ability to hypnotise their victims, but only witches would have that ability. For a vampire to feed, they would obviously need someone who wouldn’t go around shouting: a vamp just attacked me! I’ve been bit! That kind of broke the whole “secrecy” part of the Code.
‘Mostly, we’d feed from lamia – in the early years of a vamp turning, you have your own family who are willing to donate their blood to you. After they’re gone-’ Emerson took a pause, trying to catch his breath as if this were painful to talk about. ‘-Or if you were a human turned and couldn’t let your family know what you were now, there are quite a few people out there who aren’t lamia who are aware of the existence of the Blood World. People like you, though not all of them were introduced to our world through a rogue lamia breaking the Code.
‘In those cases, we would find those humans already aware of us, who were willing to become our donors for money, food, shelter… sex,’ he said the last part unwillingly, shamefully. ‘There are a lot of women out there who romanticise what it is to be a vampire.’
‘I hardly see the romance,’ I said. ‘You just seem like a bunch of extreme-anaemics with serious vitamin D deficiency, and a lot more mental problems than anyone figured. Besides how physically hot you guys generally are, you’re not that appealing. You’ve got far too many issues.’
Emerson laughed. ‘Thanks. You hit the nail on the head, though. Being a vampire sucks.’ He smiled at the pun – like he was trying to be me and deflect the pain he didn’t want the other person in the conversation to see.
‘If it sucks so badly, why’d you choose it? Did you not know what it would be like?’
‘I didn’t choose it,’ Emerson said. He fiddled with the key in the ignition like he wanted to start it back up and drive away from the topic.
‘But you’re eighteen – I just figured-’
‘I was lamia,’ Emerson said. ‘I was a witch. I was even a couple weeks away from my choice. My whole family were witches. I would have never chosen to be a vampire.’
I believed him. The harshness in his tone bordered on how I used to speak about vampires before I read the Grimm files and started to get to know Emerson as a person, rather than just the same species as the creatures that had murdered my parents. He bugged me, and I hated that I was crushing on him, but I didn’t hate him. Not how I used to feel before I understood that vampires weren’t necessarily something to fear en masse.
‘Before I’d turned, I was an empath. I could feel everything another person felt, or simply know what they were feeling – it had varying degrees depending on the person. I’d met a few vampires in my life, but every one of them felt wrong. I didn’t realise why – but it was the dissociation.
‘They were so disconnected to their own feelings and memories that it was like looking at a vacuum. For a moment you could see them experience pure joy or sorrow and in the next moment, the emotion would be completely void.
‘Usually, emotions remained in the aura of a person for a while. All humans are a mix of colours from everything they’ve recently felt to what they currently experience. Like a rainbow map of their past in emotions. Vampires are a flare of colour and then simply darkness.
‘I hated it. I know we’re not dead, not in the sense the films say where we have no heartbeat or soul, but that was the closest I came to understanding why people have thought that we were for centuries.’
Emerson had said the closest memories he had, that he wasn’t dissociated from, were the ones before his transformation. Which meant the only memories he truly possessed were ones where he’d hated what he’d become now.
Forever waiting for myself to feel old enough for kids and big life responsibilities, Emerson had phrased it as. If he’d wanted to stay as a witch, he had wanted children someday. He’d wanted a wife, probably. He’d wanted his family – coven. Instead, as a vampire, he’d had to watch them all die and forget about them. And he’d always be waiting to be old enough to have his dream, only he’d never be ready.
I wanted to tell him I was sorry, but I didn’t enjoy pity from others, and I couldn’t bear to give him mine.
‘Thanks,’ he said, as though he’d read what I was thinking.
‘Can you still read emotions?’ I asked.
I already kind of knew the answer from the Grimm files, but it was uncanny how he always seemed to know what I was feeling. I’d thought that perhaps it might be our bond, but was it some sort of residue from when he was an empath witch?
‘No,’ Emerson said. ‘The Gods only give with one hand, not both. You have to give up any supernatural power you had when you become a vampire. Even if it’s against your will.’
‘Do you think that’s why I’m drawn to you?’ I asked. ‘Because you’re lamia, but you didn’t choose to turn? That has to be rare, doesn’t it?’
‘Not in my history, but for the Blood World, yes, it’s rare. But I don’t think it’s that.
Unless you feel drawn to Charlotte, too?’
I shook my head.
‘Did the vampire who turned you have a rape kink, or did you just become friends because of it?’ I said, assuming that Charlotte and he were turned by the same vampire. It was known that vampires who were turned, rather than lamia who had chosen that path, tended to stick in packs when they had the same sire.
‘Rape kink?’
‘It’s a rape in a way, isn’t it? Taken against your will; transformed into something different than what you were before.’
‘Yes… I suppose you’re right,’ Emerson said. ‘But it wasn’t his “kink”,’ Emerson finally answered after a moment of silence. ‘It was his version of justice.’
There was a finality in the way that he said that, so I didn’t press him to explain anything else.
Emerson started up the engine again and drove me back to Maybelle’s house. We didn’t speak or turn the radio on, we just listened to the splattering of rain on the windshield that had begun whilst we’d been sat parked up and Emerson had bared a little more of his soul to me.
I thought back to the time I’d snapped at him and told him not to ask how I knew about vampires if he wasn’t going to tell me how he turned. Somehow, even when I hadn’t known his story, I had been able to pin him with a remark that brought up a horrific memory for him, equal to me seeing my own parents killed.
Despite how different we were, I was starting to realise that me and Emerson had a lot of past pain in common. And that, perhaps, it wasn’t only my body that was interested in him. The more time I spent with him and actually talked and got to know him, the more impossible it was not to like Emerson Lark.
*
The young vampire detested everything about his new life, and those that had forced him into his transformation, but he was reliant upon their charity as all younger vampires were. Like the witches and their covens, vampires often had their own packs: support systems for food and shelter; a way to retain money over the years as their long lives surpassed the human counterparts that controlled most of the world.
Twice Bitten Page 23