On the floor in front of Peter’s massive bookcases, there was a white rug that had been stained with a few stray drops of my blood. I still remembered the horrible ecstasy it had been when Peter bit me, and the way the life had drained from me in this beautiful, peaceful feeling. Nothing, not even my magical kiss with Jack, had ever felt as good as that. Even now, knowing what I know and having all that I have, I knew that if Peter offered to bite me in exchange for my death, I would gladly make the trade. My feelings for him were positively suicidal, but I couldn’t seem to help them.
I walked around Peter’s room, admiring his odd collection of things. His furniture seemed to be primarily antiques, and everything was either natural wood or white. His bed, which smelled all too sweetly of him, was far too tempting, so I deliberately steered myself away from his white linens. His book shelves were lined with books from every day and age, and I let my fingers travel over their worn bindings. Then I noticed something that made already shortened breath catch.
Peter had an entire section of books on vampires, and I didn’t mean things like Bram Stroker or Anne Rice. They were books with titles like A Vampire Dictionary and A Brief History of Vampyres. I pulled the latter from the shelf, carefully open the cover to the fragile, yellowed pages. My senses were closely tuned into Peter’s odor, but I was overwhelmed by the moldy, dusty smell that came out of the book, and I sneezed softly.
I sat back down on the overstuffed chair Peter had by the book shelves, and I started looking through it.
There was no table of contents, but it appeared there was a page missing. Instead, it started with a foreword.
“I am not the oldest of my kind, nor do I claim to be expert on them. However, in my many years of existence, I have found very little written on the subject of vampyres, other than very questionable folklore. In an effort to dispel the mythology and to create a guide for the newly turned, I have decided to write this book. In no means is to be taken ‘Bible’ for my kind, but rather, as the title suggests, a brief history of vampyres as far as I can tell.”
For some reason, my fingers had begun to tremble, and I was terrified I would rip the fragile pages out. Somehow, knowing there was a history for vampires was disconcerting. I knew they existed, but the only ones I actually knew were Jack and his family, and there was nothing particularly frightening or disturbing about them. But to think of vampires as a whole, an entire species of creatures out there, feeding on the living for the past millennia… it sent unwitting chills down my spine.
Carefully, I turned the page to continue reading. I was desperate to find out as much as I could about them. If I had been a smarter person, I would’ve started researching them long ago, but it didn’t seem as crucial. I always just thought I’d figure things out when it happened to me, but that no longer seemed good enough.
The first chapter was simply titled “In the Beginning.”
“Perhaps what is most unusual about vampyres, is that while we carry many of the same traits of humans, we lack any real creation story of our own. Some vampyres still cling onto the religion of the people, while others banish it, saying that we are proof that God does not exist. What I have found to be true is much less sensational than one would hope. We have neither a direct line with God or the devil. We are no closer to the meaning of life than any other human. If we are demons, as many believe, then we have yet to receive instructions from our master, should one even exist.
“Vampyres have not existed as long as humans have, by our best record keeping, and I was unable to find anything on the first vampyre. More precisely, I have never encountered a vampyre who admitted to being the first one, or any other vampyre who met him. Our first documented appearance happened to coincide with a plague, which leads me to believe that we are some kind of plague ourselves.”
“I see you found some light reading,” Ezra interrupted my reading, startling me so badly that I jumped up from the chair and dropped the book onto the floor. He chuckled warmly, but I couldn’t help but feel like I had been caught doing something wrong.
“I-I just- I was just curious,” I stumbled and felt my cheeks burn with shame.
“There’s no harm in being curious.” Ezra waved off my apology and walked over to me. He picked up the book off the floor, and then held it for me to take. I hesitated for a moment, afraid that it might be some kind of trick, although he didn’t seem much like the tricking kind.
“I just don’t know very much about you.” When I finally did take the book from him, I lowered my eyes to floor and pulled it close to me.
“We haven’t been as forthcoming as you’d like?” Ezra raised an eyebrow, and I wasn’t sure if he was being skeptical or sincere, making me all the more nervous. My heart beat frantically in search of the correct answer, and I fought to control before it sent Jack bursting into the room to make sure I was alright.
“No, it’s not that,” I corrected myself quickly. “It’s just…”
What was it exactly? They had all been incredibly open with me, Jack and Mae especially. When I had questions, Jack always answered them to the best of his ability, but somehow, that wasn’t enough anymore. As much as I knew, it seemed liked there was twice as much that I didn’t know.
“It’s because it’s personal now,” Ezra nodded knowingly. “Before, we were merely a curiosity to you, or an opportunity.”
“No, no!” I interrupted him forcefully. “You’re not some sideshow to me! You’re my life!”
“No, I know that. It was a poor choice of words on my part,” Ezra elaborated gently, trying to calm me.
“I know how much you care for us. But… you’d always known us as this, and whether you understood us completely or not was irrelevant. You saw that we were happy and well, and that was enough for you. But now that it’s struck Milo, it’s suddenly not enough to just know that we’re content. You need to understand everything about it.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. My body relaxed readily when I realized that he understood exactly what I meant, and why I needed to know. “So?”
“So… you want me to tell you everything,” Ezra smiled sadly.
“Yeah, kind of,” I admitted.
“I have bad news,” he exhaled. “There’s not much more to tell.”
“How can there not be much to tell?” My voice quavered with incredulity. “You’re smarter and more intuitive than humans and you’ve been around for centuries! And you’re telling me that the little bit you’ve confessed to me in the past few months covers the entire history of your species?”
“No, of course not,” Ezra laughed lightly at my fervor. “We have an extensive history, and that book you’re holding right now is a very good source of a lot of it. But it’s much like any other history book you’ve read. It tells you the who and the what happened, but you’d be more interested in a biology book.”
“Is there one?” I asked hopefully.
“There are a few,” Ezra wagged his head back and forth as if none of them were really that good.
“Peter has some, I’m sure, and if you look through his books you’ll come across them. But there are many problems with a biology book about vampires. For one thing, autopsies are impossible.
Whatever kills a vampire tends to completely destroy everything inside him, making it impossible to really dissect it all and see how it differs from a human. But that’s only half the problem.”
“What’s the other half of the problem?”
“Have you heard about the bumblebee?” Ezra casually leaned back against the end of the Peter’s fourpost bed, crossing his feet over his ankles. He looked at me seriously, as if I would immediately grasp he correlation between bumblebees and vampires.
“What are you talking about?” I shook my head, confused by the abrupt subject change.
“According to an aerodynamic study done in the early 20th century, the bumblebee can’t possibly fly,” Ezra explained. “Its wings are much too small and can’t possibly beat fast enough to carry the weight of
its body.”
“What?” I furrowed my brow in confusion and tried to figure out what he was saying. “So… What?
How do they get around then?” I decided that it was some kind of joke or riddle, and it would be better if I just played along with it.
“They fly, of course,” he smiled broadly at me.
“But you just said…:” I sighed and shook my head. “What does this have to do with vampire biology?”
“Nothing.” Ezra shrugged. “Science proved that it was impossible, even though they were seeing it with their own eyes. The bumblebee flies despite evidence to the contrary, much like myself.
Eventually, scientists managed to figure out they were looking at the wings wrong, and they work more like helicopter blades than bird wings, and they figured out the magic in the flight of the bumblebee.
“Unfortunately, science has yet to figure out the magic of us,” Ezra finished, looking apologetic.
“So you’re saying that nobody knows the answers to my questions?” I asked dully.
“Yes, and no.” He stood up, smiling softly. “You’ll find some things, but it’ll probably never be enough. Just the same, you can take a look through Peter’s books and see if you can come across anything that might help you feel better.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled, unsure of how else to respond.
With that, Ezra nodded reassuringly at me and then strode out of the room. I sighed reflexively and listened closely for his departing footsteps, but there were none. The only sound I could really hear, the only one I ever really heard since Milo had started turning, was a soft music wafting from his room that sounded like Mozart. I knew that Jack had to be somewhere downstairs, doing the cleaning that Mae had been forced to ignore.
I settled back into the chair that Ezra had startled me from and opened the book where I had left off. As I read on, I found that the faded italics offered me very little in what I wanted, just as he had predicted. It was interesting just the same, telling the story of the unnamed author and his transformation into a vampire. He described it as intensely painful and excruciating, but in the end, very brief and hard to define what exactly had hurt so much. There was just pain, and then a thirst that was absolutely unquenchable.
There wasn’t much about turning that I didn’t already know. Of course it would be impossible for me to completely understand until I experienced it myself, but the book added very little to that.
The only real new information was that some vampires turned more than others. While most retained a sense of their humanity, some of them lost it entirely. They were nothing more than crazed bloodthirsty monsters, and usually, they didn’t live very long because the humans and even other vampires couldn’t stomach a creature like that.
I had just finished reading a passage about an encounter with one such beast when I heard a disgusted scoff at the door, frightening me so much I yelped. I half expected to find Milo standing there, with shiny new fangs dripping with blood and that animal look in his eyes the book described. Instead, it was just Jack, standing in the doorway and frowning darkly at me, his blue eyes filled with turmoil.
“You scared me!” I gasped, pointing out the obvious in an attempt to alleviate his glare.
“What are you doing in Peter’s room?” He was fighting to keep the edge of his voice, but he did a very poor job of it. The last time I’d been in this room, I’d almost died, and he had to strain to keep his eyes from staring at my dried blood on the rug.
“Reading.” I held up my book for him to see, but his expression never changed. “It’s a book about vampires. I figured that I better bone up since everybody around me seems to be one.”
“Why don’t you take the book and go somewhere else to read?” Jack meant to ask it, but it was more of a demand.
“Fine.” I could’ve argued with him, and I would’ve been perfectly justified in doing so. But it felt like too much work, and the scent of Peter was rather distracting anyway. Thoughts of him kept lurking in my head, keeping my mind in a kind of a fog.
Jack stood just outside the doorway, very purposefully refusing to step inside. We had never really talked about it, but I knew that finding me dying in Peter’s arms had almost been more than he could bear. Seeing me in his room must’ve resurfaced some of the memories because he was rattled with fear and revulsion. When I walked over to him and started to slide past him out the door, he finally started to relax a bit.
“What do you have?” Jack touched my book, not taking it out of my head but just moving it so he could read the title. Immediately, he let go of the book, and he rolled his eyes and shook his head.
“What?” I looked down at the cover, trying to figure out what displeased him so. It was a nondescript leather cover with the words A Brief History of Vampyres emblazed in the cover, and from what I had read on the inside, there didn’t seem to be anything offensive about it. “It’s just a book.”
“It’s Peter’s book,” Jack grunted.
“Yeah, but you knew that when I was in his room.” I gestured back to the bookcases in his room and gave Jack a peculiar look. “Just because Peter owns something doesn’t-”
“No, no, he doesn’t just own it,” Jack corrected me. “He wrote it. That’s his biography.”
“What are you talking about?” I flipped open the book, looking for some mention of the author, but then I found a clue that contradicted it completely in the foreword. “No, it says right here the author is very old when he wrote this, and the book itself is incredibly old, and Peter isn’t even
200 years old.”
“Yeah, he wrote it when he’d been turned for like twenty years, but he didn’t think anyone would think anything of it if they knew how young he was. That’s why it doesn’t mention who he is or how old he is exactly.”
“But…” I stumbled helplessly, trying to think of something to counter it with it, but I didn’t even know why it was so important to me that I counter his argument at all.
“Was that the first book you picked up?” Jack narrowed his eyes slightly, and his tone had taken an entirely different turn. He was vaguely jealous, but mostly, he was completely sick of the whole vampire bonding thing. My blood, Peter’s blood, they only seemed to exist to drive Jack insane.
“It’s just a book!” I exclaimed, but in truth, I felt the same way as he did. I hated that my pulse quickened just at the memory of Peter, or that I was automatically drawn to his book. Any connection I felt to Peter felt like a betrayal, and I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“Whatever.” Jack shook his head and shut Peter’s bedroom door. I opened my mouth to protest further, but when he looked back at me, he had wrinkled his nose. “You smell like him.”
“Sorry,” I offered.
“Have you eaten today?” He abruptly changed the subject, but he had softened considerably. “I can order you a pizza or something.”
“I’m okay,” I shook my head. “I had a bagel earlier.”
“Right.” Jack stood awkwardly in front of me for a moment, wiggling his hands in his pockets, and then stepped away from me. “I’m gonna go check on your brother.”
“Good idea. Tell him I say hi.”
He nodded and walked to the end of the hall, into the room I couldn’t go. I was alone in the hall, holding Peter’s book, and I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to read it or not. Part of me wanted to read it even more now that I knew it was the story of Peter. Anything to get a better understanding of him would be amazing. But the rest of me knew it was a path I didn’t want to go down anymore. After he tried to kill me, a choice had been made, and he was no longer an option for me. My life was going to be something else.
While Jack hadn’t specifically requested it, I knew that a shower would fare better with him then if I didn’t. I went into his room and discarded the book on his bed before picking out a change of clothes. For now, getting clean and worrying about Milo’s condition were enough. I would decide what to do about the book later.
Chapter 6
The curtains that layered the windows were so thick that sun never stood chance. No matter the time of day, the house was completely shrouded in darkness. Since my vision wasn’t quite as advanced as theirs, Jack had rather smartly put a night light in the bathroom that adjoined his room, so when I got up to use the bathroom I didn’t tumble down the stairs or smack into a wall.
I heard a rustling, and that must’ve been what awoke me from my sleep. My cell phone was on my night stand, and I clumsily reached out for it, nearly knocking it to the floor. The clock on it said that was only two in the afternoon, so I couldn’t imagine that anyone would be awake.
Personally, I hadn’t gone to bed until seven in the morning, and Jack had still been awake playing Halo. I rolled back over, burying myself in the thick blankets of Jack’s bed. His pillows smelled sweetly of him, and while that wasn’t as good as sleeping with him, it was the next best thing.
When I heard the rustling again, I barely stirred, and decided that it must be the dog. She was the only that would logically be awake at this time of the day. Since this was Jack’s room I had overtaken, this led to some confusion with her. She usually slept at the end of his bed, but he was sleeping on the couch now. She couldn’t seem to decide if her loyalties lied more with him or the bed.
“Go to sleep, Matilda,” I murmured in groggy voice.
I was awake enough where I could feel the movement. It wasn’t actually a rustling that had woken me, because the movement was almost soundless. But there was something - almost like an electric breeze - moving about the room. When I realized that someone was in the room with me, I tried not to let on that I was awake and just listen to what was happening. There was silence, and then this shadowy movement that I couldn’t explain.
“Matilda?” I whispered hoarsely.
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