Twice Bitten

by Diana Greenbird

  It did, however, make distancing myself from the AA Team and Sons, for their own protection, a lot harder. Emerson had told Maybelle he was driving me to and from school – and he wouldn’t drive me until I’d watched his baseball practice. At church, Martha casually said to Maybelle how wonderful I was in the school play and that it would really help me out as I had no other extracurriculars to show for – so I couldn’t quit that either. Any attempt I’d had at dodging the AA Team at lunch was squashed as Gi had taken to stealing my lunch and laying it out for me at their table in the cafeteria.

  I didn’t know why they were doing it, all I knew is that somehow, they’d known I was trying to pull away from them the first few days I got back – and they weren’t going to let that happen.

  But like Christian had said, it was their choice whether they wanted me in their life – I couldn’t make it for them. Even now they knew how bad it got for those who were close to me, they still wanted me around for whatever ridiculous reason.

  Emma had been suspended for a week whilst the school “investigated” the gross misconduct of using the school gazette for slander, the case of targeting bullying and, Gi had once again brought it up, my stolen and vandalised car.

  When she did return, I saw what Emerson meant about Gi being able to take the charisma from someone else. Lisa and Hope wouldn’t even look at Emma. It was like the night of the bonfire, magnified. She was at the bottom of the high school food chain. She tried to remain cheer captain, but their coach decided to go in another direction: having Marcy lead the cheers independently. Whatever I saw around Gi and the vampires to make them seem more because of the glamour, around Emma I noticed a lack or something.

  I didn’t wear my mom’s ring until the weekend, a full two weeks since I’d taken it off. By then, I already guessed from the lack of dreams I’d been having, that if the ring’s strange energy was magic, it was only linked to the changes in my sleep, rather than any of the vampire abilities I’d been showing when awake.

  As I slipped the ring on before bed that night, I wondered if by doing so I would return to the same dreams I’d been having before: of Charlotte and Emerson’s relationship, and the life he’d had before Charlotte was turned, or if the dreams would have moved on to the next chapter of the story.

  It only took moments after I closed my eyes for me to fall asleep, and I got my answer.

  Lamia were taught from a young age the two fundamental principles of magic. One: magic was intention made real. Two: like calls to like.

  In the eighteen years of Grayson’s life before his choice, he never had any need for magic. He was a rare witch who didn’t exhibit any signs of a gift, even throughout puberty. Grayson didn’t see that as a curse. Rather, he believed it was a sign from the Universe that supernatural power wasn’t in the cards for him. Witches were always medalling, always changing things beyond the natural order, spells and potions, plotting and conjuring. That wasn’t for him. He liked the straight forwardness of simply living and allowing life to happen around you, as it was intended.

  Because of that, he never expected the principles of magic would ever become important to him; certainly not when he chose to become a vampire on his eighteenth birthday. But the principles did become important to him. For Grayson found his calling as a Finder.

  Grayson was not like other Finders – not in the sense that he was tasked with seeking out lamia who did not know of their heritage and taught them about the Blood World. Grayson’s specialisation was in finding lamia truly lost: the vampires of the wars.

  Over the decades, Grayson had helped find numerous vampires that had been lost in both World Wars and other, smaller wars: from those who had been held in camps to be experimented on and left to fade, to lamia who had locked themselves in family crypts as the rationing went on, to be woken up once the wars were over.

  There was a sense of satisfaction that Grayson experienced when the vampires were returned to this life that no supernatural power he could have ever been gifted with as a witch could compete. But there was one case which haunted him. A case which came with the image of a beautiful pixie-like woman and a plea to find her lost love.

  After every successful case, Grayson always returned to the casefile of Peter Emerson and Charlotte Bryson. They were a young couple of vampires who had been transformed around the turn of the twentieth century. The first interesting thing about the case was that they were both lamia but had been turned rather than transformed as part of their choice. Like all vampires who had been turned against their will, there had been something odd about Charlotte when he had met her, a melancholy that never quite left her for long enough.

  The second point to note was that though they were both American, they had fled to England and refused to set foot back on the continent as though they were fleeing from something or someone. Grayson had always assumed, as he had jotted down in the margins of their file, that this something/someone was the lamia who had taken their choice.

  The story of their casefile, though tragic, was not an uncommon story. Peter had been conscripted in the army under his human alias as the First World War had broken out. Lamia, though stronger than humans, were not immune to the ravages of war. He had been assigned the role of a tunneller on the Western Front. In an unfortunate, but not unexpected, tunnel collapse, Peter and his company had been lost. But Charlotte’s response when given the notification of her partner’s demise had not been to go through the five stages of grief leading to acceptance.

  As a vampire, Peter would not have been killed like his human counterparts. In all likelihood, he would be trapped under No Man’s Land, until he faded. There was still a chance he could be found and brought back to her. She could not lose him. If she did, she would be all alone.

  Grayson’s interview notes detailed how Charlotte had gone herself to France, as a nurse, and tried to find him. She petitioned to interview soldiers who had worked in the same tunnelling company and find out where they had been digging. For months she worked tirelessly to locate Peter, but with a war on, who would risk their life to look for one corpse in a field of thousands?

  Eventually, having drawn too much attention to herself, she was commanded by the Order to stand down until the human war was over and resume her search afterwards. It was only when she had retired to a small village, nestled in the pastoral north-eastern France, that Grayson first became aware of Charlotte Bryson’s story.

  His first case as a Finder had been to locate the lamia of the ghost town of Fleury-devant-Douaumont. As rations became short in the war, and the human population became weaker from lack of food, the vampires of Fleury-devant-Douaumont had decided to self-isolate in the crypts, their location kept by the local coven so they might be found and awoken after the war ended. That had never come to pass as the coven had been wiped out, along with the rest of the townspeople, when their village had been entirely razed to the ground in the Battle of Verdun, the longest and one of the fiercest artillery battles of the war.

  Sixty years later, the old grimoires of the Fleury-devant-Douaumont coven had been found quite on accident, by a team which had been sent to recover unexploded shells from the poisoned land of Zone Rouge. From the spelled grimoire, protected from all natural and supernatural harm, the Order had been informed of the location of the lamia crypt.

  No one believed that it would be a successful mission. Small objects were able to be infused with protective magics, but it was unlikely that a crypt of the size mentioned in the grimoire would have been able to withstand the sheer battery Verdun had seen. But something had protected them, whether it was magic or another force entirely.

  Grayson and his team had uncovered the Fleury-devant-Douaumont seven, and had passed them on to the recovery team to help the vampires adjust back to the life they had been on pause from. But Grayson had never been able to get Charlotte out of his mind. He had visited her constantly as she went through her rehabilitation and learnt all about her history, what had led her to the crypt –
and the lost vampire who had yet to be found. He wrote down every detail in her casefile – and tabbed it “open”, for he could not close the case in good conscious when all lost vampires within their story had yet to be found.

  It was these conversations which brought magic back into Grayson’s life. There was no grimoire to help uncover Peter’s location. But if magic was intention made real – Charlotte had the strongest will he had ever come across in all his years, she simply was blocked from accessing the supernatural gifts herself as a vampire.

  After Charlotte had been carefully rehabilitated by a specialist team, Grayson worked with her, using his Order contacts. In England, they found a coven who had lamia with the ability to spell objects. Whilst vampires could not innately possess supernatural magic, they could be spelled like any other object, human, or creature. It was only those who were immune entirely to magic who could not be spelled.

  Eventually, through a combination of magics, the coven created a spell that could track Peter’s location, both using Charlotte’s close connection to him, and Grayson’s skill as a Finder. It took until the early nineties for them to be able to not only have his exact location, but get the right permissions to be able to excavate a portion of an old battleground in France.

  Peter’s dissociation as a vampire helped him move past the PTSD most soldiers who had survived intense warfare suffered from, but he had been fading for a long time. Longer than Charlotte, and underground which had been heavily bombed and poisoned through two World Wars.

  But Charlotte, who had always loved him, was there for him. As was the coven who had become invested in finding the lost vampire. And Grayson, though Peter was his rival in Charlotte’s affections, couldn’t help but become entangled in the life of Peter Emerson. For the first time in almost a century, Peter wasn’t alone anymore.

  Charlotte still had my dream journal, so the morning after I dreamt of the last leg of Emerson’s history, I wrote down my dream in the notes on my phone.

  1992. The year I had been born was also the year Emerson had been recovered from the collapsed tunnel in No Man’s Land. Was that why the bond between us existed? We had both been brought into the world at the same moment. It was the closest link I could find to us being connected and why I could feel his presence before I saw him.

  After school, on the days we didn’t have rehearsal, I would come over to the Sons’ apartment and go through the dreams, my weird senses, the changes that was happening with my scars, and we would try and find a link, something that would make it clear what was happening to me and why.

  The visions were dismissed as an anomaly – not something connected to my preternatural senses and healing. It was an odd coincidence, but having a spelled ring that gave me visions didn’t mean it would have catalysed any other change. Spelled objects were singular in their focus, apparently. We would have tested the out with one of the Sons trying it on to see if they dreamt of anything, or whether the ring worked only for me, but vampires didn’t sleep so that was a no go. Mostly, the ring and my visions were forgotten about by Emerson and Grayson; they wanted to focus more on the vampiric side of the changes. It was only Charlotte who remained interested in them.

  ‘Every vision you’ve had until now has been in chronological order. I think you should keep wearing the ring. The next dream you have should be the most interesting.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’ll be one within a timeline where you exist,’ she said.

  ‘Have you gotten any closer to finding a witch who might be able to read me?’ I asked.

  ‘Possibly,’ she said. ‘There are a couple in covens I know close to here. It’s trying to find a witch who both Emerson and Grayson agree should do a reading on you that’s difficult.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because Emerson doesn’t want someone inexperienced or overly complex trying to delve into your energy and figure it out. He thinks it would just confuse you and send you running.’

  ‘Overly complex?’

  ‘Some witches only ever speak to other lamia. If you’ve not grown-up learning about magic, and the Universe, it can be hard to understand what they’re saying. Their own energy can be quite… unsettling, I’ve heard, for humans.’

  ‘And Grayson’s problem?’

  ‘Grayson doesn’t like meddling witches in general. His mother was a power augmenter and his father used her to rise in the ranks through the covens and perform spells that messed with the natural order frequently. He prefers to think of your problem as something we can solve without a witch’s help.’

  I hadn’t seen that in my dream, only known that Grayson had never wanted any part in the supernatural side of the Blood World.

  ‘So, I have question that’s not exactly relevant,’ I said, figuring now was the time to ask something that had niggled at the back of my mind since the bonfire. ‘How can you read the energy? Grayson’s always said I have weird energy and you sensed my ring. I thought vampires didn’t have any supernatural powers once they turned.’

  ‘We don’t,’ Charlotte said. ‘But energy is different. Even humans can feel it. Chi. Life force. It’s in every living thing and therefore every living thing has the power to sense it. With spells… no, I can’t sense those the same way as I would have when I was a witch. But there’s something about the ring that feels connected to my energy – my retrocognitive gifts I was forced to give up.

  ‘I assume I can sense that because its infused with the same energy that connected me to life, once. But I can only speculate. I would have to ask a witch to know for sure.’

  ‘No offence to Grayson or Emerson, but just find whatever witch is willing,’ I told Charlotte. ‘I can handle mystic crap or whatever freakiness a “complex” witch throws at me. This shit isn’t happening to them and if it’s all ramping up to my eighteenth, we’ve only got six weeks to figure out what’s going on before it could become too late.’

  Thanksgiving holiday came and went without a word from Charlotte about finding a witch who could help figure out my shit. I might have pressed her, reminding her of the ticking time bomb that was my birthday right at the beginning of the New Year, but dissociated vampires really didn’t do well with time.

  With the play a couple of weeks away, rehearsals picked up their pace. Emerson had to choose between baseball and We Will Rock You – and chose the play every time. He was close to being kicked off the team, but every morning practice he attended was pro-level, so the coach kept him on simply for the sake of winning the season. If any of the other baseball players felt a hint of resentment that the Son got special treatment, they didn’t air it aloud.

  Everyone knew their lines and the rehearsals came down to perfecting the dance numbers and staging than anything else. Gi seemed more distracted than usual. She had gone to visit her mom’s side of the family over the holiday weekend.

  ‘Does she know now?’ I asked Emerson on the way home from school after baseball practice. He’d gotten his car back a couple days after Ali had text him its location.

  He nodded. ‘I’m just waiting for her to come to me,’ he said. ‘It might take her a while to process it. Her family told me she took it quite well. But it’s still a lot for someone to take in.’

  I noticed more and more the odd looks she would give at the Sons during lunchtime. We hadn’t talked much since the Friday I fled from school, but it wasn’t like she was actively distancing herself from me. She was just… distracted in general.

  On occasion, I would catch her looking at me more strangely than she ever did the Sons. I had to wonder whether she saw my odd energy. If she was a witch, then she would likely see more than Grayson ever did – and he had always been freaked out by the peculiarity of it. I wanted to ask what Gi thought of it. She must know I wasn’t lamia, but did I register as human to her?

  The only thing I could be thankful for was that the Emma-gazette drama had completely bypassed any talks I would have needed to have with the AA Team or Gi around what was goi
ng on relationship wise between me and Emerson. We’d gone back to how we had been before the bonfire and the public kiss, but I could feel the shift between us. Emerson was still trying to keep me close, whilst I was trying to put him at arm’s length to protect him. But I had a feeling it was much too late. Especially when Emerson said he had a surprise for me.

  ‘I don’t like surprises.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Emerson said. ‘You’ll like this one.’

  He parked up at the lot next to his apartment. We left our bags in his car but instead of leading me towards the lobby, he took me further into the lot.

  ‘Before you get weird, I want to say that it’s a joint Christmas and birthday present.’

  ‘You know those things suck,’ I said. ‘Joint presents. They’re like the bane of the existence to any person born near Christmas.’

  Emerson didn’t bother taking me seriously. Either he knew me too well, or he was honestly too excited to give me his “surprise” that he didn’t care.

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. Even when Emerson pulled off the rain cover to the bike.

  ‘Holy… shit,’ I said.

  ‘You let your friend buy you a Porsche. This wasn’t half as expensive so don’t try and tell me to give it back or-’

  ‘Not a chance in hell. Where are the keys?’ I wasn’t even going to point out that there was no way Nowak bought me a Porsche.

  Emerson laughed at me and handed me the keys he’d been keeping in his jacket pocket this whole time.

  ‘I thought you didn’t like surprises?’ Emerson taunted as I straddled the bike.

  It felt perfect between my thighs. He’d got the exact model of my baby before she’d been scrapped. I hadn’t worked for it. I hadn’t paid for it. But I really, really didn’t give a damn in that moment. I had a bike again.

  I put the keys in the ignition and revved the engine. It purred like a beauty. Emerson passed me over a helmet he’d been hiding god knows where, like he was afraid I was going to drive off immediately without any protection. I put it on my lap. I didn’t like to wear it until the moment I was going to ride off.