Poison Blood, Book 1: Revelation

by Neha Yazmin

  Chapter 9: The Slayer

  The next morning, I open my eyes and find myself in my bed, in my bedroom. I wasn’t asleep or anything – we don’t sleep, remember? – but I had my eyes closed all night, thinking about everything I’ve learned about my self.

  I’m not who I thought I was.

  Mum’s not who I thought she was.

  Nothing’s the same anymore.

  Despite my brilliant memory, intelligence, and advanced senses, I find it difficult to believe it’s only Thursday morning. The day after Wednesday. The day after I discovered that my biological father was a lying, cheating, heartless adulterer.

  The morning after I found out the truth about myself.

  My other dad, Jake Dalton, has already left for work – I heard him leave after a quick, wordless breakfast with my mum and Heather. My little sister is heading out the door for school right now.

  “Ellie,” my mum calls as she knocks on my door a few seconds later. She never used to knock before. It used to annoy me big time. Now her knocking annoys me because I heard her lock the front door, rush up the stairs and approach my room. I even heard her hesitate, the air vibrating around her hand which hovered uncertainly in the air before she finally knocked.

  “Come in,” I say because she doesn’t enter until I do. I shake my head at her when she comes and sits on my bed. I sit up.

  She’d left me alone in my room last night, saying how I probably wanted some space to get my head around things. I did. But I always needed space and when I really cared about having it, she never gave me any breathing room. Knowing now why that was, I don’t feel bitter about it anymore. I sort of feel loved and protected and precious. Important.

  I am all those things.

  “Where do I start?” mum had said last night when I demanded to know what the hell was going on.

  “How about the beginning?” I breathed, crawling to my bed and struggling onto it. She came and set next to me, took my hand in hers and gave it a kiss. “How can you do that?” I blurted out. “My cold skin doesn’t bother you? You hardly seem to notice it…”

  “Oh, I notice it alright,” she chuckled under her breath, squeezing my hand. We were still talking very quietly, just moving our lips, yet we heard each other loud and clear. “But you’re right, it doesn’t bother me. I have this built-in buffer against all these abnormalities.” This reminded me of how I barely felt the coldness of Christian’s body when we were together. I had this buffer too.

  Most of the time, his skin had felt as hot as mine.

  “Who are you?” I asked her, almost rudely.

  “I’m nothing, really,” she shrugged. “I used to be the Slayer though, before you were born.”

  Slayer of vampires, I surmised immediately.

  “I was brought up in London,” mum continued, finally in storytelling mode. “I knew who I was from a young age and spent most of my childhood training for the day when I would be old enough to fight them. Fight vampires.

  “Even though I didn’t have my powers yet, even though I hadn’t officially become the Slayer, I was still a great hunter. From the age of 15, I was out with the others, tracking them down, trapping them, and poisoning them to death with my blood. It’s the only way non-vampires can kill them.”

  I nodded at this. Only vampires can kill vampires. By tearing their bodies into bits and burning the pieces to ash. And to tear us apart, you need something as sharp and hard as our own teeth.

  You wouldn’t find that kind of knife in the utensils section of your favourite department store.

  “Well, the only way non-Slayers can kill them,” mum clarified. “The thing is honey, the Slayer is a magical creature herself, and once she gets her powers, she is armed with almost all the super-human abilities of the blood-suckers themselves. Great reflexes, eyesight, hearing… The Slayer matches each of their strengths. She is human, yet as fast and strong as her enemies, and can heal quickly.

  “It evens out the playing field a little. It means they can’t easily outrun me, can’t take hold of my wrist and crush it into crumbs between their fingers like they would be able to with any ordinary human. So they had to fight me and beat me if they wanted to get away unscathed. They rarely did. I was pretty damn good at my job.

  “If they were lucky enough to corner me, usually because they had some extra supernatural power, like Lydia and Christian, biting me would be suicide.

  “They refer to Slayers as Poison Blood. They think that’s the only thing that differentiates Slayers from other humans. That they’d be able to defeat us if we didn’t have this strange gift, a curse for them.

  “But we’ve never held this belief. You see, Ellie, just like they don’t really need the venom to incapacitate their victim while they feed, I never needed the poisonous blood as protection. It’s never been my weapon. I see it as a superfluous defence mechanism–”

  “How come?” I’d interrupted curiously. If I wasn’t a vampire, I don’t think I would’ve digested all of this so quickly. Still, it wasn’t easy.

  “If my blood wasn’t poison to them, they’d still find it pretty difficult biting me. They’d be too busy fighting me, defending themselves from my attempts at slaughtering them.

  “Let me show you,” she suddenly said, rising to her feet. She seemed excited, thrilled even.

  The next thing I knew, I was following her down the steps leading to our basement, which, as far as I knew, was blocked off. Unused and neglected since before we’d moved in to the house. Heather and dad were in their respective bedrooms, oblivious as we ghosted down there, hardly making a sound.

  “Of course this is where you train,” I said, shaking my head as I entered the space below our home.

  Big as the house itself, the room was concrete-grey and damp. One light-bulb hung in the centre of the room but she didn’t turn it on. We could see each other fine. A huge punch-bag was hanging from the ceiling in one corner and a blue foam mat lay on the floor in the opposite end of the room. Something about the way my voice travelled back to me told me this room was soundproof, but I couldn’t figure out how…

  “Try to bite me,” she said after I was done appraising the room. She was speaking at a normal volume which cemented my hunch that the room was soundproofed. “I might be a little rusty though.” She lifted her hand and gestured me forward when I just stared at her, aghast.

  “Mum, what on earth?” I said, unable to comprehend that she genuinely seemed to want to fight me. “I’m not going to do this. No way.”

  “You’re not chicken, are you?” she smirked.

  “Really? You think that sort of sledging is going to work?” I turned and made for the exit.

  Half a second later, I growled. I hadn’t growled in my whole life! It was an angry sound I let out because I’d just felt a blow to my back. Hard. Nothing felt hard to me! Hit from behind, I’d also taken a stumbling step forward. What the hell?

  I was facing my mum’s self-satisfied grin before I even thought about turning around to investigate whether some giant pendulum had taken a swing at my back.

  “I didn’t hurt you, did I sweetheart?” She smiled sweetly.

  “That was you?” No way. No bloody way!

  “I told you I was a little rusty,” she said. “That was my best kick and it used to do a lot more than temporarily knock a vampire’s balance.” She seemed impressed with me.

  “No way,” I kept saying.

  She came forward, as though to calm me down, but instead she landed a punch right in my gut. I arced forward, clutching my stomach. It only stung a little; the shock had more of an impact on my brain than her attack on my body. Mum was at the other end of the room in the same second.

  Okay, so she was rather fast and strong. No match for me, but there was no way I was going to prove this to her. I wasn’t going to fight her, no matter how strong and fast she thought she still was. She was my mum. I felt an urge to protect her, not hurt her.

  She called me forward
again but I shook my head. “Come on honey,” she pouted. “I haven’t fought a vampire in years. Let me have some fun. And I just want to prove to you, a vampire, and a–” she stopped and changed tack. “Don’t you want to see an ex-Slayer in action? Don’t you want to see how difficult it would be for a vampire to try and bite me whilst we fought? You’re not even a little curious?”

  My curiosity got the better of me and I succumbed to her challenge.

  “Now that’s a good girl,” she approved. “Remember, your main aim will be to try and bite me. Any part of my body you can sink your fangs into.”

  We bowed to each other on the karate mat and then took a couple of steps back. Circling each other as though in a boxing ring, we contemplated which move to attack with first. I’d never battled another human or vampire, so I didn’t have the skills of someone who’d trained to be a Slayer, hunted vampires since she was 15. But I was strong and quick, and since vampires are predators, fighting is instinctive to us.

  Still, I’d go easy on her.

  Unbelievably, I only managed to get a couple of kicks at her sides and one punch to her gut. Damn, she was fast! And she was right; I was too busy trying not to get hit – because her hits did slow me down a little – to have any time to try and bite her. Each time I lurched forward, as quick as I could, aiming for her neck, she either moved out of the way or hit me in the gut.

  She made sure to only attack me from the neck down, keeping her arms and hands a safe distance away from my teeth. Clever, because if she tried to slap me or punch me in the face, I’d have had my fangs in her skin in the same millisecond.

  To human spectators, I suspect we looked like two blurs dancing around each other, going in and out of focus as we moved at incredible speeds, rather than mother and daughter in combat.

  If I really asserted myself, I think I could’ve defeated her quite easily, but it wasn’t about winning or losing. She just wanted me to know that her blood was only secondary protection from vampires. She was equipped with everything she needed to kill them without it.

  “Incredible,” I whispered as we sat ourselves down on the mat afterwards. She was panting but I wasn’t. Vampires don’t tire. “All this time I’ve been wrongly thinking that we’re invincible. That no human could end us.”

  “But there’s only ever one Slayer,” she reminded me, her mood subdued. “One amongst the thousands of them, and that’s just the agents of The System. It doesn’t include the nomads, the roamers. Only one Slayer for each generation. That’s hardly enough.” She seemed so regretful of this.

  In her eyes, I could see the desire to want to clone herself, or split herself into a million pieces, if only she could rid the world of my kind. I realised I had the same desire. Us vampires are killers, monsters. We feed from the innocent and don’t give it a single thought.

  We shouldn’t exist.

  “Back to the story,” she said a few quiet, contemplative moments later. “So I always knew I was going to be the Slayer. Gave up my childhood in preparation for it. I loved it though. The training, the planning of the missions, the tracking and luring of vampires to their death. The years didn’t pass quick enough for me. I wanted to be 18 as soon as possible and finally get all my powers. Or rather, have my existing abilities enhanced and at their optimum.

  “When my 18th birthday arrived, I loved the present I received. At last, I could go patrolling by myself, battle any new vamp in town, investigate missing persons and trace it back to the monster that killed her. Each time I annihilated one, I got this amazing buzz. There’s nothing like it. It made me stronger and faster.

  “I met David on one of my patrols.”

  My eyes widened. Of course, she never told me this part, or disclosed the details of her relationship with him. I just assumed they’d had a fling and he left when she got pregnant with me. Thinking about it, I realised that she hadn’t actually told me anything more than his name and where he was, and that he wasn’t worth my asking about the kind of person he was.

  My teenaged mind had filled in all the gaps with my assumptions and fantasies.

  “I saved him from a female vampire who’d picked him up at a bar and taken him back to her place,” mum informed me methodically. “I followed them inside the house and pulled her off him just as she was about to bite him. I knocked him unconscious during the process – as you’ve seen, I am quite strong – and he only came around after I’d chopped the vampire and thrown the pieces into her own fireplace.”

  Mum’s face suddenly went red and my quick mind figured out why. Killing vampires gave her a buzz. A high. David was confused and wondering what happened to the beautiful woman he’d just pulled and who this other one was. But not confused enough to refuse her when she wanted to… because she got a little…

  Ugh! Thinking about mum in this light was truly grotesque. Too much information! Yet, I could totally understand her reckless behaviour. I’d been just as reckless with Christian.

  When you’re turned on, you’re turned on.

  Hunting vampires was an aphrodisiac for her, just like my fear, combined with Christian’s scent, acted like an aphrodisiac for me.

  “Of course we were careful,” mum murmured, realising that I’d figured it all out by myself. “I made it clear it was just a one night thing and he didn’t argue. We never saw each other again. But six weeks later, I found out I was pregnant. With a daughter.” There was an edge to her voice when she said daughter.

  “What, you were hoping for, a boy?” I joked.

  “I am a descendent of a long line of female Slayers,” she said slowly.

  “But you said only one Slayer per generation…”

  “Yes. Only the Slayer’s first daughter inherits her mother’s powers. As soon as she’s born, her mother is no longer the Slayer – the daughter is. I wasn’t my mother’s first child but I was her first daughter. And you are mine.”

  I couldn’t get my head around it. I am… I am… Well, I was…

  The Slayer.