by Logan Byrne
I saw an opening towards the back, so I took it. The others were too busy fighting, and I couldn’t let the chance go to see if they were hiding anybody here. Lamps were on, papers strewn about the floor, as I rushed into the back office and searched for the man from the club. He wasn’t here, but I noticed there was a cigar, still lit, sitting in the ashtray on the desk. I pushed it off, smashing it on the floor and stomping on it. He was here! I knew he was!
Angry, I went back out, grabbing the tungsten handcuffs from my bag and starting to cuff any and all vampires I could find inside. Shira and Britta came in from the back, all of theirs cuffed and posted up outside, before I looked around at the carnage. Bottles and glass were broken everywhere, with bar stools smashed and blood spattered on the wall. Blake cuffed the last suspect, all of them accounted for, aside from the boss and whoever else was with him, before backup came.
“What are you doing here?” Xelia asked as a few officers came in through the front door.
“We got a call about officers needing assistance, so we came,” one said.
“I called it in, don’t worry,” Shira said, her hands on her hips. “We would need them to do the booking anyway, and I knew we couldn’t transport all the suspects ourselves.”
“What a scene,” I heard, before Gorchank, our weapons lockup friend, came through the door.
“Been a while since I’ve seen you,” I said, smiling.
“Same to you, love. Looks like you really did a number on these vampires,” he said, walking over. “Guess they didn’t know who they were dealing with.”
“Come on, boys, let’s get them out of here,” Shira said, and they began to grab the suspects and start the teleportation process back to the precinct.
“Come with me,” I said to Xelia, grabbing her ice-cold hand and leading her back to the office.
“Looks like the base of operations here,” she said, walking inside.
“The cigar,” I said, pointing at it. “Just like at the club.”
“Was in such a hurry he smashed it,” she said, kicking around the shards of glass.
“Yeah, looks like it,” I said, slightly embarrassed.
“Do you hear that?” she asked, looking around.
“No, what is it?” I asked.
“It sounds like, I don’t know, breathing maybe,” she said, putting her ear up to multiple points in the room. “Charlie, come here.”
“What’s up?” he asked, walking inside.
“Shift and tell me if you hear breathing,” she said.
“Oh yeah, I do,” he said, walking on all fours around the room. “I know why we can’t catch a break on it.”
“Why?” she asked.
“It’s below us,” he said, putting his ears to the floor.
“Move,” I said, pushing them out the door. “Eruptico!” I shouted, the wooden floor blowing up as splinters and planks of wood flew in every direction.
“Could’ve just looked for stairs,” Charlie said. “They would’ve had them.”
There were women down below, all of them hooked up to the same kinds of machines as in the club, none of them woken up by the explosion. “Can’t believe they didn’t take them,” I said.
“We might have surprised them too much. They probably didn’t have the time or resources to get them out of here, and they thought we wouldn’t find them here. Little did they know,” Xelia said.
We hopped down, checking around as I illuminated the room with my wand, looking for any clues. The only thing here was a staircase upstairs, but no other rooms or areas where the babies were. Maybe they weren’t holding them here at all.
“We should get these women out of here and get them into the infirmary. Some of them look like they could give birth any second,” Xelia said.
“What about the babies inside them?” Charlie asked.
“What about them?” Xelia replied.
“I thought we weren’t supposed to, you know, leave them,” Charlie said, looking a bit conflicted.
“It’s not our call to make right now, they aren’t even born. We’ll let people a little higher up decide that,” she said.
With the IVs still in their arms, we hoisted the women out of the basement and to waiting officers and paramedics who took them back to the precinct to get proper care. It was hard; some of them looked my age, like they could be me. What if I had gone to a club like this before I found out I was a witch? It could happen to anyone, being abducted and forced to change like this. Xelia said it best earlier, how she never chose this life and her mortal life was taken from her because of one bite to the neck. At least Charlie and Blake were born shifters, not bitten by them and given what would feel like a death sentence in a world you never grew up in or came to know on your own.
I looked over at Xelia as she instructed other officers, wondering about her old life and what she used to do. She was from a different time altogether, and she’d lived through wars and peace, technology, and everything between. She would’ve been long dead by now if she hadn’t been bitten, very much long dead, and now she was here, fighting the very people who stole her from a mortal plane of existence. It was sad, and I felt sorry for her, even if she had accepted it and moved on with her life. Nobody should be forced into something like this.
17
I received notice the next morning that the girl I’d talked to previously, the one who’d been transformed into a vampire, was awake and feeling up to talking. In fact, she’d asked for me specifically, which made me perk up a bit. Maybe I could get close enough to her to get answers as to anything she remembered about that night. I didn’t expect much; she likely had so much in her head and on her plate that it would be hard, especially after the very long time she’d been out, but it was best to find out anything at all that could help.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, sipping on a drink as I walked into her room. She was still in the same infirmary room, sitting upright in her bed with two large pillows stuffed behind her. “I’m sorry for the way I was before. It’s not like me.”
“Don’t be sorry at all. You were under a lot of stress, and I should’ve been more understanding of that and backed off. How come you wanted to see me?” I asked.
“I’m not sure what to do, or who to talk to, and I remembered you coming here,” she said.
“Are you unsure what to do because of what I told you?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, looking down as she fiddled with her thumbs. “What am I now?”
“Well, to be honest, you’re a vampire,” I said softly.
“A vampire,” she replied, shaking her head. “I thought those were just in books and movies.”
“Yeah, a lot of mortals do, and it’s better that way, I think. There’s an entire other world, the magical realm, where creatures and things you thought were only myth are actually real. All your stories and myths exist because of encounters with our kind, mainly back centuries ago before we really went into hiding,” I said.
“What are you?” she asked. “Are you a vampire, too?”
“No, I’m a witch,” I said, laughing. “But one of my mentors, Xelia, is a vampire.”
“Was she born one?” she asked.
“No, she was bitten, many years ago, just like you. Vampire babies are actually very rare, which is what, you know, happened to you,” I said.
“I heard. I don’t feel like I had a baby, though. Are you sure I did?” she asked.
“The doctors seem to think so, but I personally don’t know for sure. We did find you in a place where that sort of thing was going on, though. So you feel okay?” I asked.
“I guess I feel about as okay as one could feel, given the circumstances. I just can’t get over it,” she said, putting her palms against her forehead and rubbing up and down. “I was mortal, as you call it, going out to a club for the night so I could let off some steam and just get out. Now this happens. I don’t even feel like myself anymore.”
“That might pass, you’re still
in the earlier stages, especially after just waking up from your sedation,” I said.
“I can’t go back to my old life, can I?” she asked.
“I’m not sure, I’m probably not the best person to ask about that kind of stuff, given I’m not a vampire. I could ask Xelia to talk to you. But I would think you could, at least to an extent. Being a vampire isn’t a death sentence per se. Well, that was a bad example, given the whole undead thing,” I said, scratching the back of my head.
“I hadn’t even thought of that. Can I, you know, die?” she asked, looking concerned, as if losing her mortality would be one of the worst things about this.
“You can, just not naturally. You would have to be killed, and in a specific way, to truly die in the way you’re talking about,” I said.
“What do I do?” she asked, looking me in the eyes.
I could feel her pain, waking up in some infirmary after thinking you were knocked out for a couple hours because of something that happened at a club. My life changed drastically after finding out I was a witch, but at least I was already neck-deep in the magical realm and had grown up in it. It was normal for me to see a warty ogre walking down the street, or to run into a shifter in a dark alleyway. For her this was going to be the most frightening thing to ever happen to her. She still hadn’t even heard the worst part, either.
“I really don’t want to be the one to tell you this, but I feel I have to. I feel for you right now, I do, and I think it’s best for me to just be open and honest with you about everything that’s happening to you and will happen to you,” I said, rubbing my clammy hands together.
“What?” she asked nervously, a tinge of apprehension in her tone.
“Well, as you might know from television and movies in the mortal realm, vampires don’t really get sustenance from normal things. I mean, you can eat and drink, mainly for social situations and all that, but you won’t get anything out of it,” I said, clearing my throat. “For that, you would need to, well, feed.”
“You mean…” she said, drawing out her sentence.
“Blood,” I replied, my toes nervously tapping the floor.
She closed her eyes, taking a deep breath, then letting it out and obviously trying to gain control of her emotions. “On people?” she asked.
“No, you don’t need to do that. That would just be doing to them what happened to you, remember. Really any blood will do, I think, and there are services here in the magical realm that will get you blood without you having to hunt it down. There’s even an app for it, if I recall,” I said.
“There are apps here?” she asked, puzzled.
“Sure, just like in the mortal realm. This realm is kind of interlaced with the mortal one. They aren’t like different dimensions or anything like that. Just like a closet part of the world that’s a little different. You’ll come to learn a lot more about it as time goes on,” I said.
“Well, that doesn’t sound as bad then. Hopefully I’ll be able to leave soon and go home,” she said.
“If you do, you have to keep all this a secret. You cannot expose yourself, or even bring somebody from your old life into this realm,” I said.
“What will happen if I do?” she asked.
“Bad things, to you. We rely on secrecy, it’s ingrained in us from birth until the day we die, and you could be imprisoned for exposing magic to mortals,” I said.
She sighed. “Well, thank you for helping me. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to all this,” she said, looking around the room.
“I know it won’t always be easy, but I think you’ll be fine. Like I said, being here can be pretty cool, with magic and all. I’ll let Xelia know to talk to you. I think she could be of more help,” I said, with a little smile.
I saw something of myself in her, unable to shake the thought of that night Mirian came to my motel room to tell me about my powers. I was so paranoid, walking home from that bar as I felt a presence behind me somewhere. I was barely scraping by there—some would even say I wasn’t scraping by at all—before I ran into him in my motel room.
I’d had little trinkets and cheap items strewn about, not yet selling any of them or bartering them for food or clothes, and yet he didn’t care. He was a cop, a powerful one at that, and he didn’t care about where I came from or the things I’d done to survive. Instead he offered me a chance, a chance to become something I’d always wanted to be. A chance to make my parents proud, even if they weren’t on this Earth any longer.
I thought about them as I walked away from the infirmary and back towards Charlie, who was finishing paperwork on our motorcycle club raid so I could talk to the girl.
I hadn’t dreamt about them in a while, my parents, or the night that they were murdered. My mother begged me to go to my old place and hide, my special hiding spot inside my bed, before she was struck down by a homicidal maniac. M.A.G.I.C. officers found me, rescuing me, and then my story began. It was crazy, looking around here, and down at my uniform and wand, knowing that all this might not have happened.
What if my parents hadn’t been killed that night? I knew now I’d always had the mark, and the accompanying magic, but there was no way I would’ve joined this force had I not been in the position I was. My parents would’ve lost their minds if I told them I was going to hunt criminals all over the world and put my life on the line like this. They were a little overprotective, especially when they thought I was a pilt, and they felt they needed to smother me and help me because I would be at a disadvantage when I got older.
Even though they wouldn’t have been too crazy about me risking myself, I knew they would be proud of me and what I’d accomplished, let alone what I was setting out to accomplish. I knew they would stand on the side of right and justice, and taking down Kiren and his administration was going to be the justice I strove for. I wanted my name in the history books not for having the mark, not for my magic, but for what I was going to do to topple a dictator and bring peace and justice back to a generation of magical creatures, as well as the mortals that Kiren sought to enslave.
I was going to do it all, and I was going to do it with them watching me. I knew they had to be out there somewhere; I hoped so at least. It was what got me by during these dark times.
I couldn’t shake the thought of my parents later that night as darkness settled in when work was over. “What are you thinking about?” Britta asked, obviously seeing how unsettled and antsy I was as we sat in our room talking.
“It’s my parents, I can’t stop thinking about them. I thought about them today, for the first time in what feels like a lifetime, and now it’s like the floodgates have been opened,” I said, pacing around our room.
“That’s normal, I think, to have these kinds of feelings. What are you thinking about them?” she asked, setting down her book.
“I just feel like there’s so much I don’t know about that night,” I said.
“The night they were murdered?” she asked.
“Yeah. I just remember fragments of it happening, like my memory is shielding me from the horrific parts, or the parts that hold clues that could lead me to finding out who did it and why. I just want to find out more,” I said.
“Have you ever gone back? To the house, that is,” she asked.
“No,” I replied, biting my left thumbnail.
“Why not?” she asked. “Maybe that would help you.”
“I’m not sure I can go there. What if people live there now?” I asked.
“What if people don’t? I feel like you could drive yourself mad thinking about the ‘what ifs’ with this situation. I think it would best serve you to visit it, at least to get the peace that would accompany visiting. Think of it like a gravesite. You haven’t been to the house since you were taken away. Maybe it will help,” she said.
“Then let’s go,” I said, grabbing my coat.
“What? Now?” she asked. “We can’t go now.”
“Why not? When is a better time to go? I’m going,” I sa
id, slipping on my socks.
“What? Wait, I need to go with you. You can’t go alone. God, I can’t believe this is happening,” she said, getting her shoes and coat on.
“Ready?” I asked, before she nodded and grabbed onto me. I thought of the outside of the house in my head, the street, before we ripped through space and time and were dropped on the street in front of my old house.
“Rough area,” she said, after we landed.
“I don’t remember it this way,” I said, looking around. Many houses were abandoned, with plywood covering the windows and doors, as dogs, or maybe shifters, barked and howled in the distance. Trash was lying about, and as I walked up to the busted iron gate that guarded our front entrance, I felt a surge of memories come over me.
“I remember my dad playing with me out here,” I said. The gate squealed as we opened it. Memories flashed before me, cheerful sunny days with my dad letting me ride him like a horse around the front yard. I smiled, like I was there again, before the bitter, harsh reality of the moment came back to me and I was in front of a dilapidated old house that hadn’t seen any memories in ages.
Britta waved her wand at the door, unlocking it, before she pushed it open. There was a hole in the ceiling to the next floor, the wood planks ripped and splintered, and a thick layer of dust coated everything. The furniture was still here, most of it, anyway, though it had been waterlogged and ripped apart by both time and animals that had probably nested in here over the years. It smelled musty, the smell giving me a little bit of a headache, but I didn’t care that much. I needed to press on.
“Is this you guys?” Britta asked, wiping sludge off a silver photo that sat on the credenza in the living room.
“Yeah, it is,” I said, breaking open a smile, a tear running down my cheek.
“You three look beautiful,” she said, looking over at me before wrapping her arm in mine. I stared at the picture. Our smiles were glistening and bright as I sat in my dad’s arms.
