by Mia Archer
I thought to the dream. Thought to the two strange women I saw in that dream. One I’d never seen before and yet that darkness, that presence, seemed oddly familiar. The other I had seen, and she’d acted like the dream was strangely familiar.
I blushed. Had I been reaching out across the distance with my dream without realizing it? I didn’t know.
I was close enough to campus that it made sense that someone who’d been such a strong presence in my dreams might be pulled into it. I’d read all about dream magic even if I’d never had a chance to practice any of it myself.
You didn’t have to have magic to enter someone’s dreams like the Coven Mother had with me on that embarrassing night a few weeks ago. The magic made it easier, but it was possible without the magic.
And apparently whatever I felt for that vampire was strong enough that I’d pulled her in. I blushed as I remembered the feel of her lips against mine. I bit down on a growl as I realized the strong feeling might’ve been lust rather than the hatred I should feel for the woman who killed Selene.
She’d been so beautiful. So powerful. So confident, and yet so open in the dream where she thought there were no consequences.
I blushed. Wondered how far it might’ve gone if I hadn’t woken up.
My pulse still raced as the memories wrapped around me like a warm comfortable blanket. I smiled. They were just pleasant memories, after all. It’s not like it had happened in reality.
Even if it had been nice enough that I could almost wish it’d been a real experience.
I looked at the clock on the nightstand. Five in the morning. That meant my parents would be getting up in about an hour so we’d have plenty of time to get ready before heading out to the dorms.
It also meant there wasn’t a chance I was getting back to sleep. So I stood and walked over to the motel door. Stepped out and let the sounds of a strange new city wash over me.
The motel stood on the edge of campus. I leaned against the railing as I looked towards the glow in the distance that was the university.
I’d be spending a good chunk of the next four years of my life there if things went well. And if they didn’t go well? Well that meant there was a good chance I’d die on that campus.
I sighed. Dreams. Vampires. Danger. This was all overwhelming me and I hadn’t even started classes yet. I didn’t know how I was going to focus on studying with all this going on.
She was out there somewhere. They were out there somewhere.
I shivered and stepped back into my room. Better in here where a vampire couldn’t bother me without an invitation than out there on the second floor of a motel where anything could come along and hurt me if it wanted to.
An hour. I figured I might as well shower and get ready. I had a big day ahead of me. My first day on campus.
The first day of my hunt for justice for Selene. Even if my body betrayed me and yearned for something more than justice from that strange nameless vampire who haunted my dreams.
6
Ivy
I stirred and my eyes flew open. A dream. I’d been dreaming. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d dreamed. I took great pains to make sure no one could get into my dreams.
I had to ever since Anne came along. I frowned as I thought of an embarrassing episode back in the eighties that had prompted me to begin protecting my dreams in the first place.
I frowned as I tried to remember about the dream, but the memories slipped away. I’d been in the forest again. The whole thing reminded me of that night with the girl.
The night I’d failed that girl. The night I’d started what could very well be the beginning of a war between vampires and the mages.
Diana had been there tonight. I remembered that much. Why would Diana be in my dreams? The thought was disturbing. Unless, of course, the two of us had been pulled into someone else’s dream. Which was equally disturbing.
It was possible, but it would take a very powerful magic user, or a very powerful dreamer, to do something like that.
There was so much I didn’t know. So much Mother was keeping from me because she didn’t think I was ready.
I sat up and looked around. I didn’t do anything so gauche as sleep in a coffin. I was in a room on the second floor of the sorority house. The best room in the house, and one I’d personally overseen when we built the place.
Movies always liked to depict vampires living in dank basements in coffins. I always figured there was no point in being so theatrical when a good pair of blackout curtains from the hardware store more than did the job.
There were no telltale signs of sunlight peeking in through the curtains. Still night. I turned one of the new electric lights on and glanced at my alarm clock. At least three hours until dawn.
Good.
I stepped up onto the roof five minutes later and instinctively moved my hands to rub my arms against the night’s chill. Though of course it had been years since I’d actually needed to ward off the chill of night. It was a habit from when I was living that I still found myself doing all these years later.
The sorority house rose four floors above ground. There were seven floors total if you counted the basement and then the secret levels below the basement where some of the more unsavory aspects of life in a vampire sorority were carried out.
Aspects I would’ve done away with long ago if there were any way around it, but there were limits to even what I could accomplish with my new way of life. We hid among the humans, but you couldn’t tell a predator they couldn’t hunt. Not unless I wanted them to rip me limb from limb for suggesting they shouldn’t be allowed to enjoy their birthright.
Within limits.
I walked over to the edge of the roof and looked out over campus. That odd feeling was still there. As though there was someone out there looking out across campus at the same time. I thought I could almost feel her brushing my mind, and that was a chilling thought.
Someone brushing my mind could only mean there was a powerful vampire or mage out there who was trying to find me. Given everything that’d happened recently with the death of that girl I had a pretty good guess who’d be out there trying to reach my mind.
I shivered. Not because of the cold, but because I suddenly felt something I hadn’t felt since that night so many years ago when Mother turned me. The night I’d discovered vampires were real.
Fear.
I didn’t care for it.
“Who are you and what are you doing out there?” I asked nothing in particular.
Of course there was no answer.
I tried to remember any detail that might tell me more. The dream felt so familiar. As though there’d been echoes of that dream rattling around in my mind for some time.
Who was that girl? She wasn’t the witch Diana killed without realizing what she was doing.
No, this dream girl was different. I remembered thinking she was beautiful, but that was all I could remember. She had a face I felt compelled to kiss. That kiss ignited a fire in me that I hadn’t felt since I was living. A fire I didn’t know was even possible since my undeath.
There was one way to find more answers though. Even if it wasn’t an idea that I relished. Diana was somewhere in the house below, and she might have more answers.
I ghosted through the sorority down to where the pledges slept. There’d been no party at the house tonight, and so most of us had taken the opportunity to rest. Even for the undead there was a limit to how much partying our bodies could take before we needed to regenerate, hence why I was sleeping through the night.
And the pledges should have been sleeping through the night as well, even if their slumber wouldn’t be nearly as pleasant as ours.
I stepped into the basement and my ears were assaulted by a piano track from some song by a girl named Vanessa. One of the sisters who’d been turned about a decade back swore this song was the perfect torture for pledges.
The song was irritating. Especially when it was played over a loudspeaker.
There were several reasons why we had the basement levels of the sorority thoroughly soundproofed, and the worry that someone might hear screams when we were on the attack was the least of those reasons.
I saw several dark lumps, but there was something odd about them. They weren’t moving and shifting like someone being kept between sleep and wakefulness by the same song being blasted over and over.
My frown deepened. Something was wrong here. I went over to a hose we’d installed on one of the walls and held it out. The floor was concrete down here so we could use the hose without worry as long as we didn’t get it on the walls. There was even a drain in the center.
Anyone who came down here and saw the setup would think we’d created the whole thing to torture pledges or for easy cleanup after a particularly wild party. No one ever gave a second thought to the idea that there might be another purpose for a big drain in the center of the basement and a hose to clean things off.
Our parties could get out of hand sometimes, after all, and there weren’t always pledges to clean up after with toothbrushes.
I sprayed down the lumps, and my fangs lowered when they didn’t move.
The pledges weren’t down here. Those bitches had snuck out again! I would find them and I would kill them. I didn’t care what Mother said!
I didn’t bother to tell anyone where I was going. Blood pulsed through me. Not my blood, but the blood of an early morning jogger who’d been running along the path behind the sorority. I’d taken enough to give him a hell of a headache, but not enough to kill him or turn him. He might have some very bad dreams for the next month or so though.
I followed the pledges’ scent along the jogging path, not bothering to conceal my speed. It was dark enough that there was no point. I would show up as a blur on any of the many cameras on campus that had made our work so much more difficult in recent years, and anyone who saw me in the flesh would think they were still hung over from the previous evening’s fun.
Oddly enough their path didn’t lead towards campus proper, but rather around it. Interesting. If they were going out to cause mischief I would’ve expected them to try going through the university where there were always at least a few people out and about.
Soon enough I found myself in a little commercial area next to an Interstate off ramp. Anyone who was coming to the university for the first time would likely come through this spot as it was the most direct route to campus for outsiders. There were several twenty-four hour diners as well as a couple of hotels and motels.
I stopped as I looked at those motels. Again I was hit with the overwhelming feeling that there was something out there watching me. Something out there that was just barely brushing against my consciousness.
I shook my head to clear the thought away. I was after something far more important here tonight. The pledges were out there somewhere, and there was no knowing what sort of trouble they might cause if I didn’t stop them before they caused it.
Diana’s scent was getting stronger. It was a stench that filled my nostrils and made me want to puke. Though of course puking wasn’t really something I’d done since being turned since the blood I took from my prey went straight into my veins.
I stopped at the edge of a small gas station adjacent to a motel. I didn’t come to this part of town often. I rarely left campus unless it was time for me to leave for my decade of exile, but it was easy enough to leap to a ladder that was locked a good six feet above ground to keep people from getting on the roof.
No problem for me though. I scrambled up to the top. Diana and the other pledges were close. I could sense them. I knew if I walked to the edge of the gas station facing the motel and looked down…
There they were, huddled together whispering to one another. No human would be able to hear them, but I had no trouble. It was obvious they weren’t making use of their senses either, because not a one of them bothered to look up as I stared down with a mask of fury on my face.
I waited, though. I wanted to know why they were out here. What they thought they were doing leaving the sorority house in the middle of the night.
“I’m telling you that’s her,” Diana hissed.
“That can’t be,” Elle replied. “You’re acting crazy.”
“You don’t just see girls in your dreams,” Jessica said. “That’s not something that happens, even for vampires!”
That gave me pause. A girl from her dreams? That was the confirmation I needed. She had been there, actually been there, rather than a creation of my mind. That meant the girl, her face so hazy in my memory, had been there as well.
Fear gripped me. Twisted my stomach to the point of pain because I wasn’t used to this feeling. That could mean there was a witch out there hunting us when no vampire had been hunted like that in centuries.
“She’s over there,” Diana said. “We have to go over there and get her. She’s just leaning on that railing! It’ll be easy!”
I turned to the motel. My eyes ran along the first level and then the second. I was starting to think Diana was going crazy when I saw her.
My breath caught. She was the girl from my dream. Of that there could be no doubt.
She was the most entrancing creature I’d seen in my long years of undeath, and I felt the urge to step off the gas station and go to her.
I resisted, of course. I was better than the pledges. I also knew more than they did. I knew this girl could be a danger. She’d appeared in my dreams which meant she was potentially a vampire or a powerful magic user.
Or it could be she was a human in the wrong place at the wrong time who had no way of knowing what she was doing. I had no way of knowing, and I had no intention of getting close enough to find out.
She stared out across the packed parking lot. Tomorrow was the beginning of move-in at the dorms. There were plenty of people staying here because they didn’t want to make a long drive early in the morning.
For a moment I almost thought she could see me. It was as though her eyes were boring into my own, though of course that thought was ridiculous. If she was human she couldn’t see me from her vantage point.
Then she turned and went inside.
“Damn it,” Diana said. “Now we can’t get her without an invite. You jerks made me wait too long!”
I looked down again, suddenly reminded of my wayward pledges. I might not know what to do about that strange girl who’d aroused feelings I hadn’t entertained in decades, but I certainly knew what to do with misbehaving pledges.
And I knew that no matter what happened I needed to keep Diana away from that girl.
So I stepped off the roof and landed in the middle of them. They scattered, then turned and looked even more terrified when they realized who stood among them.
All of them looked terrified except for Diana, that is. Her look was less one of terror and more one of defiance. She was going to continue to be a thorn in my side, and Mother’s orders would only make that more difficult.
I could maybe start to get things under control tonight though. It was time to show them who was boss and take Diana away from that mysterious beautiful girl, whoever she was.
7
Lisa
“I can’t believe my little girl is going off to college!”
“Yeah, how about that?” I said, a nervous laugh escaping my lips.
“You need to promise to write every day,” dad said. “Send emails and text me with what’s going on at school. That’s what you do today, right? Text?”
I rolled my eyes. “Dad. I’m not going to be able to miss you if you don’t leave.”
My pulse was racing and it was everything I could do to keep under control. If this kept up for much longer I was going to start hyperventilating.
This was it. I was here. The vampires were out there somewhere, and it was up to me to find them.
Only now that I was here everything felt so different. So much had changed since I was here for orientation. Everything had changed.
I d
idn’t need mom standing there looking worried. I didn’t need her staring at me like this was the last time she was ever going to see me.
No, I needed the same thing every college student needed on move-in day: for my parents to leave.
Now.
I was just glad my roommate hadn’t showed up yet. We’d exchanged a couple of emails going over the basics, but I didn’t even have a face to go with the name.
Weird how she wasn’t even online as far as I could tell. I thought everyone was online in this day and age. One thing was for sure. It was a good thing she wasn’t here to see my mom trying to hold back the water works.
“I think Lisa has had enough excitement for one day what with the car trip and the move,” dad said. “Why don’t we go get dinner somewhere in town honey? You can have a nice drink while we’re there.”
Mom stared at me longer than I was comfortable with. We’d already said everything that needed to be said. I didn’t want to go through it again.
“I’ll be fine mom,” I said.
“I wish I could believe that,” she said, a hint of the same old argument coming to her voice.
Oh yeah. We’d had words, but I was an adult now and she couldn’t stop me from doing what needed to be done.
I would have my revenge.
Dad cleared his throat. He’d been doing that a lot lately. Poor guy had no idea what was going on.
Oh he was well aware he’d married a witch. He was a total Darren, the word we used for men who discovered the magical world via their dating choices, but he didn’t know what I was doing here.
He had to drag my mom out of the place. Finally the door slammed shut and I was left alone with my thoughts.
I sat down on my bed and focused on my breathing. In and out. In and out. I concentrated on a focus exercise and felt the magic that powered the world waiting there in the darkness, just at the corner of my vision.
