by Vance, Ramy
If the vampire switch could be switched off, for all I knew it could be switched back on just as suddenly. And if I happened to be outside … great balls of flame à la moi!
I really should start walking around with an umbrella.
Just when that thought occurred to me, my eyes were drawn to the large oak tree in the center of the quad, beside that GoneGods-awful statue of the university founder, where I spotted three human hockey players tormenting some homeless guy. Except, given his unearthly pale white skin and ruby-red eyes, this homeless man clearly wasn’t a man at all. He was an Other. A type of Other I’d never seen before.
I was pretty hip to Others—able to recognize most of them on sight, thank you very much—but this one eluded me. He didn’t even have any of the telltale signs of what religion or folklore he belonged to. There was no wispy mustache so typical of Chinese traditions, no protruding lower-jaw tusks most Japanese demons had and no animalistic and oddly two-dimensional attributes you found in most Egyptian Others.
Instead, he—I think he was a “he”—wore baggy white pants that were scuffed and dirty but when clean would have matched his impossibly white skin. He had a long-sleeve dirty white shirt on that looked more like undergarments than a proper top. His hair was also the same white as his skin, and because the coloring matched so perfectly, it looked more like strands of skin on his head than actual dead-skin-cells-and-keratin hair. In fact, the only thing he had on him that wasn’t white was his cane—a crooked oak staff that looked too flimsy to actually support someone’s body weight. Not that he had much weight to him. He was absolutely emaciated. The term skin-and-bones didn’t do him justice. It was more like skin-sundried-on-bones. Poor guy must’ve been dying of hunger.
The lead human—a largish guy with black hair and a nose that looked like it had been broken, set wrong, then broken again—kicked the homeless guy and shouted, “Get out of here, you freak!”
A second human—a smaller, skinny guy with blond hair tied back in a ponytail that will totally embarrass him when he is older and looks back at pictures of himself—said, “Bad enough they let these freaks enroll in the school, but now we have to put up with their vagrants, too. Oh, hell no!” He emphasized this by spitting on the Other.
That was the last straw. I ran down the steps of the building, over to the tree, and grabbed the skinny guy. Using a move I learned from a judo master in Kyoto some 150 years ago, I pulled him back so that he fell over his own feet and tumbled backward.
I put myself between the other two humans and the Other and, summoning a real gem that I probably got from Degrassi: The Next Generation or Beverly Hills, 90210, said, “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” Stupid really, because I was picking a fight with them, and all three of these guys were way bigger than me. I really had to work on my vernacular.
The biggest one pointed at me and said, “Get out of our way, little girl. Otherwise—”
I grabbed his finger and twisted. This wasn’t a move from any martial art I’d learned, but something I’d used against my little brother when I was human—three hundred years ago, sure, but it still did the trick. The big guy cried out in pain and tried to punch me with his free hand. I pulled back and kicked his shin, forcing his left leg out and his right knee down. Then, when we were about eye level, I punched him. Hard. In the nose.
There was a sickening crunch! Given how little power my punches usually packed—since I became human, at least—I must’ve been right about his nose being broken before. The thing crumpled like a paper cup. He dropped to the ground, blood pouring out of him.
His friend, a slightly smaller version of him, sized me up and decided to charge.
Employing a move I learned from an aikido master in San Francisco (about forty years ago, if you’re keeping track), I used his own momentum against him, guiding his body into the wall behind me. He hit face-first and dropped to his knees.
The ponytail guy stood up, saw his downed buddies and ran. The other two managed to collect themselves from the grass, the bigger guy still clutching his blood-gushing nose, and followed their friend. I half expected them to say something like “You haven’t seen the last of us!” or “We’ll get you, just you wait and see!” but I didn’t get any of those cliché gems as they ran away.
Looking around to see if there were any other threats, I saw that a bunch of people were looking at me from all around the quad. And not just students. Professors, Others—heck, even Justin Truly was watching from the steps of the Arts building across the quad. Suddenly, several of them started clapping, then hooting, then cheering.
I guess standing up for this Other was a … good thing?
I realized something, blushing as my peers and professors clapped me on the back. I may not be smooth or the bee’s knees or even the cat’s pajamas, but I was heroic … and in this new GoneGod World, that seemed to count for a lot.
After I gave a few bows and enthusiastic thumbs-up, people went about their usual business again. I turned to the homeless Other, fished through my bag and pulled out a granola bar that had been sitting at its bottom for weeks. I handed it to the guy, half expecting him to eat it cellophane and all.
But he didn’t. Instead, he read the wrapper in detail and, breathing a sigh of relief, handed the unopened granola bar back. “Thank you,” he said.
“You can have it. I mean—eat it.” I tried to hand it back.
The strange Other looked at me with a confused expression on his face. “I already did.” He groaned. “Not very good.”
“OK …” I said with trepidation. I had to admit, though, that this guy looked a little better after having read the package. I was beginning to wonder if this weird Other didn’t eat granola. Or oats. Or whatever this supposed nature bar was made of. Made sense—after all, you would no more give a rabbit steak than a lion a carrot. For some Others, eating mortal food was deadly. Maybe that’s why this poor guy was so emaciated. Human food just didn’t work for him.
“So, no granola?”
He shook his head. “No granola,” he whispered.
“So what can you eat?”
“The truth?” The poor guy was so weak that he was having trouble speaking.
“Yeah, the truth,” I said, trying to throw in as much empathy as I could. It was possible that this kind of Other ate something very unappealing to humans. Kappa ate algae. Pixies considered maggots a delicacy. And succubae ate— Well, succubae drew nourishment from sex. Besides, who was I to judge? For three hundred years I lived entirely off of human blood. Let she who is without sin cast the first stone. Stones firmly in pocket.
Being a bona fide Homo sapiens and law-abiding citizen meant there was no way I could have sustained myself on pig and cow blood. Believe me, I had tried and it nearly killed me. But that’s another story. As for these newly mortal Others, algae, maggots and sex weren’t something you could get at your local grocery store or farmer’s market, so kappa learned to eat kale, pixies substituted nuts for maggots and succubae bought naughty mags for a quick snack. It must have been a rough existence, and rarely a day goes by that I don’t silently thank the GoneGods for taking their magic and turning me human again.
I looked down at him with an understanding smile, waiting for his answer, but the strange Other just groaned in response. OK—so be it. I took a mental picture of the guy, determined to figure out what he did eat, and said, “I’ll be back tomorrow. With real food. I promise.”
His eyes glistened with gratitude.
I looked at my watch and saw that it was quarter past one. My next class started in fifteen minutes—no real chance to go to the library now. Especially because I had no idea where my next class was. I was really, really, really starting to regret not going to the orientation meet-up, but it was at eight in the morning—and I hadn’t seen that ungodly hour in over three hundred years.
My map was a mess—I didn’t know where I was and there was no convenient “You are here” mark, no conveniently labeled “Oa
k Tree Quad.” Just when I was resigning myself to missing my second class on my first day, a hand snatched the map out of my hands.
“Hey,” I said, getting ready to kick someone in the shins … until I saw who the perpetrator was. My demeanor immediately changed and I tried not to swoon too hard. “Hey, Justin.”
“That was pretty amazing of you,” he said.
“What was?”
“How you kicked those guys’ asses. Total jerks, by the way.”
“Oh, that. They were being bullies. I hate bullies.”
“Me, too.”
“Oh, great. Something we have in common,” I meant to think—but wound up saying out loud. Girl, get a grip!
“Yeah, we do, I suppose,” he said, eyeing me curiously. “I take it that outside of being scared of light, you’re also a bit quirky, too.”
“You could say that.” I blushed. “Is that a bad thing?”
“No,” he said, “I like quirky. And I like cats … so we’re good here.”
I felt my blush darken three shades.
“So—where are you going?”
“Going?” I said in an absentminded tone.
He held up the map.
“Oh, yeah—class. I’ve got Literary Theory in Alternative Cultures now, but I have no idea where I’m going.”
“That will be over here.” He pointed at a building on the map. “Here—I’ll walk you.” He held out his arm like gentlemen used to do when inviting dames to dance in the 1800s. How retro of him.
“Cute and helpless—works every time.”
He looked at me, his eyebrow doing that dance again. “Excuse me?”
“Oh, nothing.”
I took his arm, and as I did, his O3 Bros sang out from the top of the hill: “Justin and Weird Girl sitting in a tree!” Neither of us said anything, but we both looked up and smiled. This would have been a perfect moment … had it not been for the kid from West Africa staring down at me from behind the others on the hill.
That guy was really starting to give me the creeps.
Libraries Don’t Just Have Books, You Know
My second class went a lot smoother than my first. No mishaps with cute football players, no speaking my thoughts aloud and drawing the whole class’s attention to me. And no jumping at the sight of light. I’m particularly proud of that last one.
With class over, I checked my schedule: no more classes today. In fact, my next class wasn’t until 3:00 p.m. the next day. Sheesh … university life. I had fifteen hours of lectures and that was it. What was a girl supposed to do with all this free time?
I hefted the monstrosity my professor called a textbook, considered all the articles that were supplemental material (plus, let’s not forget the five essays in this class alone) and realized that if I wanted to do well here, I knew exactly how I was supposed to use the rest of my time.
Reading, writing … and not sleeping.
It was day one and already I knew that all the parties, boys and fun that Animal House, the Van Wilder series and Revenge of the Nerds promised were lies.
As they say in my native Scotland: nae bother. I wanted to do well. I needed to do well.
I will do well here, I told myself, even if it kills me.
Time to hit the books. After, that was, I kept my promise to that pale white Other and figured out what he ate.
Either way, it was off to the library for me.
Finding the library was a lot easier than finding my last class. For one thing, it was the biggest building on campus, and for another, you could see all those books through the windows. No map necessary.
I walked inside and approached the directory. In the old days—and mind you, by “old days” I mean five years ago, just before the Others came—you couldn’t find an entire library section dedicated solely to mythical creatures. That stuff was usually distributed between sections: the Classics housed information about the Greeks and Romans; the Asian Studies section had all the stuff about Japanese, Chinese, Indian and other Asian countries and religions; and if your library had a children’s section (this university, surprisingly, did not), that’s where you’d find most other fairy tales.
But these days, all those books were collected into one department, aptly called Other Studies.
Bingo, I thought. Or did I say it out loud?
The Other Studies Library was so big that it had its own building. An old converted church that sat on the main campus right next to the Arts Building. It was easily half a football field in size, three floors high, the upper levels had wraparound balconies looking out into the center of the library, where all the study tables were located. Dozens of bookshelves lined both sides of the study area and, from my angle, I could see that the upper level held several dozen more sets of shelves.
I’d never seen so many books in one place.
I didn’t know what Heaven was like—and now that it’s closed, I guess I never will. But I imagined it to be this place.
When I was a vampire, I spent a lot of time in libraries. This was before television, remember, and I was really into reading, devouring every book I could get my hands on. I did also eat the occasional bookworm—I don’t know what it was, but humans who were into reading tasted sweet, like sucking on a mango.
So, walking into the place, my heels lightly tapping on old, worn marble, its soft tones echoing off wooden shelves that housed well-loved books—well, for the first time since I’d become a university student, I felt at home. I closed my eyes, lifted my hands from my side and spread out my fingers so I could absorb this place all the more.
“Of course,” I thought, “I’m not really absorbing anything, but it still feels good to try to soak it all in and—”
“Ahem.”
I opened my eyes to see several people sitting at the study tables staring at me. A few were suppressing giggles, but most just gawked at me, like I was a freak or something. And they were right—I was talking out loud again, and, according to TV and movies, only freaks and the criminally insane talked to themselves.
There was a second “Ahem” and I turned to see an old man standing near an old oak desk. He was staring at me over the rim of his reading glasses, his bald head reflecting the lights overhead. He did up the top button of his jacket and pointed a weathered finger at a sign.
Please be respectful of those studying.
“Sorry,” I whispered, and walked to the back of the room, now very conscious of the tapping my heels made with every step.
When I made it to the back of the library, I saw that books weren’t the only things this massive library housed. Toward the back of the main floor were numerous rows of display cases. I walked over and found that they housed hundreds of artifacts. Some of them I recognized: an old Bleeder vampires pricked their victims with when they wanted to slowly drain them overnight; a spiked silver collar mages used to control their pet werewolves; an obsidian ceremonial blade once used for human sacrifice; a Horn of Abundance that the desert-wandering nasnas blew to summon their nightly feasts.
There were even several of King Solomon’s rings, each of their rubies trapping a protective spirit that would do the wearer’s bidding. I wondered if the rings still possessed the trapped spirits … not that it mattered. It would take powerful magic to release them—and powerful magic was in short supply these days.
But the artifacts and rings were just the tip of the mythical-artifacts iceberg. Most of this stuff I had no idea about, but this much was clear—a lot of Others donated a lot of their stuff to this place.
I walked among the artifacts—some impossibly old, others once supremely magical in nature—in awe until I wove my way to the back display, where I saw something I had never expected to see again in my life. Right there in a display case that hung on the back wall was a full Scottish uniform from the late 1800s, complete with tartan, ghillie brogues, sporran, kilt pin and dirk. I don’t think it would have stood out so much if it wasn’t for the fact that it was my clan’s tartan—when I had a cl
an to call my own.
But it was more than just recognizing the old crisscrossed bands of color that made up my clan’s pattern. You see, at the foot of the display sat a faceplate I hadn’t seen in centuries. The faceplate facade was designed to cover the wearer’s face from hairline to chin, and because it was made of iron, it also protected the wearer from attacks. That thing was built for battle. Not that you would assume so by looking at it. It was fashioned to look like a baby’s face, complete with rosy cheeks and an innocent smile that a fool would interpret as friendly. I recognized the mask immediately. It was my father’s … and it was what he wore the night he hunted me down in the Grey Friar’s abbey.
The night I killed him.
As I took a step closer to the display case, still lost in thought, I suddenly sensed a presence behind me. What the—?
“Can I help you with anything?”
I turned. It was just the old librarian, standing directly behind me. Either the guy had the prowess of a cat or I had been too distracted to sense him there—probably the latter, from the look of him. Either way, he scared the bejesus out of me.
“What?” I yelped.
He lifted a finger over his lips, then in a whisper repeated, “Can I help you with anything?”
He was so close I could smell the mint coolness of a lozenge still on his breath. He also had that old-man smell to him, but not an I’m overmedicated, sick and waiting to die kind of smell. This smell said, This body has seen and done a lot in its years, and those experiences have been soaked into my bones. Hey, don’t judge me—as a vampire, smell was very important to me. Like a wine connoisseur’s nose, mine told me a lot about the person I was about to eat.
Old habits, and all that.
“No talking, remember?” I mouthed, giving him a serious look.
At this, he let out a muted laugh, and a warm smile overtook his features. “There are degrees to which a rule can be bent without breaking it. If we are respectful, no one will mind our whispers.”
