Dearest Jane,
I had expected that you would need some time to think about the offer I have tendered to you. I understand that such a decision cannot be made lightly; however, decide you must. I have reason to fear that Astrid may have somehow become aware of our plan. While she is dreadful, I don’t believe she’d be so malicious as to try and thwart us. Still, I had hoped that we could keep our arrangement with Dr. Erdos a private matter between us. My concern is that, out of injured feelings, Astrid may inform the community. That may, in turn, make things more difficult for us. Or perhaps it may not. In either case, the time draws near. I await your reply.
Eternally yours,
Timothy
Well, obviously Timothy hadn’t received many notes either, otherwise he probably just would have gone with, Do you like me? Circle “Yes” or “No.” I refolded his letter and slipped it into the front pocket of my jeans.
I unfolded the second sheet, expecting more of Timothy’s calligraphy saying something along the lines of, Dearest Jane, I am still awaiting your answer. Please remit forthwith. Ceaselessy, Timothy. Instead, the writing was kind of inky and blocky and smeary. It said simply:
I smiled at his signoff. I wondered for a moment what it was that he had to tell me, but his mention of our history project reminded me of our history teacher, and that what I really needed to do was focus on why I’d come here. I couldn’t put it off any longer. I emptied most of my bag onto the bottom of my locker, leaving it untidy for the first time since I’d enrolled. I closed the door and twirled the lock. Maybe I’d straighten it later. Maybe I’d never get around to straightening it before … before I still didn’t know what, just yet.
I approached my American history classroom and let myself in. While I expected most teachers to be with the student body in the gym, the Ms. Smithburg I was now getting to know didn’t strike me as the type to have a tremendous amount of school spirit. Though the chairs were empty and the lights were off, it didn’t mean that she wasn’t there. I walked past the blackboard and pull-down map to turn the knob to the little anteroom that served as her office. There, leaning back in the chair, with her patent pumps up on the little worn desk, was the vampire lady of the hour.
“Well,” she said, in mock surprise, “if it isn’t Jane Jones! I marked you as absent today when you weren’t in class.” She placed her feet on the floor and leaned forward on her elbows, boring into me with eyes that I once found friendly but now considered hard and cold.
“I was doing some research,” I said.
“Oh, research? How very straight-A-student of you,” she said in the same mocking tone. “Was it for your history project?”
I gritted my teeth and glared at her. “I know what you are,” I said. If Charlotte Smithburg had been surprised by my big announcement, you never would have known it. She merely sat back in her chair, folding her ivory hands over the crisp waistband of her wool skirt and sniffed.
“Do you?” she said. “Well, you were bound to find out sooner or later. Frankly, I’m surprised it took you as long as it did. Your intellect may be sharp, but your instincts as a vampire? Woefully inadequate. But, of course, that could be because you’re so sickly.…” That was kind of a cheap shot, but I decided to take one of my own.
“My instincts are working just fine, thanks. They led me to Fairhaven and the old church and the priest you’ve been glamouring so you can live in his bedroom while he sleeps on the floor like a dog.”
This time, I noticed a little flash of alarm register in her eyes.
“Why not just get a house like any normal, responsible vampire with a job?” I asked. “Is it because of that dusty, rotting, half vampire, half corpse you’re hiding down there?”
This time, she had the involuntary gasp of someone who is at least slightly surprised. Then she narrowed her eyes at me.
“That rotting half vampire, half corpse is my husband,” she hissed. Whoa, now that was something I hadn’t seen coming. Well, whatever. I wasn’t here to talk about relationships.
“I don’t care who he is,” I said. “What I want to know is why you went from being someone I thought was a decent teacher to someone who’s kind of a stalking psycho.”
My words seemed to really hit home with Ms. Smithburg. Her fists unclenched and her pinched glare relaxed. “Jane,” she said, her voice softening. She stood and walked around to the front of the desk and leaned against it, making a steeple of her hands beneath her chin. “I have been looking for you for a very, very long time. The reason I’m here—the reason I took this job—was because I needed to find you.”
I wasn’t understanding this at all. I’d lived my life pretty anonymously up until now. At least I thought I had. Why would anyone be looking for me?
“Why?” I said. “There are plenty of others like us in this world, if you needed some vampire bonding. And unlike myself, most of them aren’t even defective. So why’d you come after me? To screw with me about my past?” I felt myself getting emotional. Stupid trace amounts of teenage hormones.
“I am truly sorry that I had to put you through that,” she said. “With all of the aliases you’ve used and all the places you’ve lived over the years, it was difficult to be a hundred percent sure that you were even the right girl. I’d been down so many dead ends.” Was she making a pun? Because it didn’t really seem like a great time for puns to me.
“Then I mentioned the Dust Bowl to you and the look on your face told me everything I needed to know. I couldn’t believe it was really you.” She reached out her hand to touch my face, but I backed away.
“Well, it’s really me. Congratulations. So, what exactly is it that you want?” I said. I’d seen movies where one person searched for years for another person, but somehow I doubted she was about to give me the keys to a castle I’d just inherited in Transylvania.
“It’s not what I want. It’s what I need. Actually, what my husband needs. From your family,” she said. Again she moved to touch my arm, and again I stepped back.
“My family? What are you even talking about? My family barely has anything. What could you possibly need from us? How did you even know about us and where we came from and … and—” Slowly, somewhere in my mind an idea began to form about just exactly whom I was speaking with, but I was nowhere near ready to accept it.
“Jane … ,” she said, “I know this must be very difficult for you to hear, but my husband and I were there that day. The day that your family—well, you know, was made.…”
“Became vampires?” I fired back. “You were there?”
“Your father invited us in. And your mother looked so worried. If we had done nothing, they all would have died. We were doing them a favor,” she explained, circling back behind the desk and sitting primly. Something about the way she was putting things didn’t sound exactly right to me, and it nagged at the back of my mind as she continued. “Now we need a favor from your family in return. My husband is sick.”
This was an understatement. The guy looked like he was at undeath’s door. And as far as I was concerned, he could stay there. The rage I felt for what this woman and her putrefying husband had done to my family was sharper and icier than any feeling I’d ever had in all of my eternal life. I balled my fists to keep my hands from shaking as Ms. Smithburg continued telling me things I didn’t want to know.
“Many years ago, in the 1970s, my dear husband mistakenly fed from a human with contaminated blood. Hepatitis, we believe. He became ill and weak, and we were told by elders in the community that the only chance for him to become well would be to feed from one that he’d created,” she said.
“So you spent years looking for me so that I could let your husband suck my blood as a thank-you to you both for making my life a freaking hell? Well, that is really too bad because, guess what? Never. Gonna. Happen.” I seethed.
Ms. Smithburg sighed impatiently, as if I were a thick kid failing to grasp a simple historical fact she was trying to teach me in class.
“Jane. Josephine, actually, isn’t it?” she said. “I spent years looking for you so that you would lead me to your family. Understandably, if one of them recognized me, they’d be … upset. But you never saw me, because on that day you were so sick. I remember you bundled up and dirty on a straw mattress, apparently delirious with fever and hunger. To tell you the truth, we thought you were dead already, or else we might not have left you alone. But we did,” she pronounced, “leave you alone.”
My mind reeled as certain things became clear while other things spun out of focus. When I’d seen Ms. Smithburg bolting from the school on Tuesday it was because she was terrified that my parents would see her and identify her. But if what she was claiming was true and she and her husband never bit me, then …
“How did I become a vampire, then? If you never touched me,” I asked, challenging her.
Ms. Smithburg lowered her chin and looked at me with a pitying expression.
“Oh, dear. Your parents never had the talk with you?” she asked. “Well, this is awkward.” Her tone became derisive again. “Let’s see … sometimes when a man vampire and a woman vampire love each other very much …”
Now she was toying with me and I’d had enough. I stepped forward and leaned over her desk, to show that I wasn’t afraid of her, when really, I was kind of afraid of her. A lot.
“Just tell me,” I growled with bogus bluster.
“Oh, fine.” She pouted. “From what I can guess, when your family woke up and saw what had happened to them, they must have become hysterical. And then when you failed to die, like you should have, they must have become even more hysterical. Then, because they loved their little girl and couldn’t dream of living eternally without her, they decided to go ahead and turn you too. Unfortunately, what they didn’t know then was that when an immediate family member turns another, it has terrible results. It’s similar to inbreeding. At least that’s what I’ve heard from some elders within the community. You know, your family could learn a lot from the community, if they didn’t seem to love being such eccentric little outsiders. At any rate, their terrible error is certainly why you have that awful blood-intolerance allergy that’s made your life so pathetic. It was a rookie mistake.”
I felt like I’d been punched in the stomach and I could barely breathe. I looked down at the floor and clutched the edge of the desk to steady myself.
“The good news,” said Ms. Smithburg, “is that you are useless to me. So you’re safe! If I had found you and your family sooner, before my husband’s health had declined so much, we might have been able to make do with just a donation. Now I’m afraid it will require more of a complete sacrifice. So I do apologize for that.” I raised my eyes from her desk and looked her full in her wicked face.
“You stay away from my family,” I ordered.
She leered and clucked condescendingly. “Such a fierce warning, Jane. But even if you were smart enough and strong enough to protect your family, the day will come when you’re not there,” she said. “We can wait for that day.”
With that, the minute hand on every clock in the school lurched forward in unison and the midday bell rang. Ms. Smithburg stood up, smoothed her skirt, and said, “Class dismissed!”
Before I could think to do or say anything, she was gone from the office and I was alone.
fourteen
I banged through our back door and threw my backpack down on the kitchen linoleum. I shoved my hand into the drawer where my mother stored our few kitchen implements and felt around for anything sharp. Nothing. Fine. I grabbed a spoon, flung open the freezer door, snatched the plastic zipper bag containing my supply of rare Bombay blood and slammed it down on the counter. I opened the bag and jabbed sharply at the icy red mass until a baseball-size chunk flew off and skittered into the sink. I reached up into the cabinet and grabbed one of the glasses my mother usually served the rest of my family’s blood meals in. My solid blood blob wouldn’t quite fit. Fine! I reached up for an old, cracked teacup that had been left in the cupboard by the previous occupants of our house. I wiped furiously at the cup with the damp dish rag that was hanging over the faucet, then tossed the frozen lump in and set it in the microwave to twirl around on the defrost setting. Usually, I would step away from the microwave just in case it was giving off radioactive waves or something that might be harmful to vampires, but this time I stood right in front of it and stared through the glass as the blood melted and became a puddle within its vessel. When the oven beeped, I popped open the door, wrapped my hand around the cup and brought it to my face, breathing in the warm metallic scent as I prepared to—
“Jane, what are you doing home?” My mother, arriving in the doorway and seeing me, stopped and clutched at the front of her blouse in anxious surprise. “What’s going on here?” Never in my life had I been angrier with someone. I wheeled on her and before she could say another word, I bared my fangs and poured the gory contents of the cup into my mouth, swallowing all at once. In my entire time as a vampire, the thought of consuming so much blood at once hadn’t ever crossed my mind. Instantly, heat spread throughout my chest and limbs. My face tingled. It was undeniably intoxicating, and for the first time, I could understand the sinful appeal of gorging on some unsuspecting victim.
“Jane, what have you done?” She rushed toward the counter, picking up the bag that contained what was left of my food supply and examining the significant dent I’d made in disbelief. Then she dropped the frozen blood and grabbed my face, looking into my eyes. “What have you done?”
“What have I done?” I cried. “What have you done? Huh? Maybe you should answer that.” I allowed my anger to boil over, and because of the surplus of blood coursing through my veins, it felt like flexing a taut muscle. Violent energy flowed through my skin and into my mother’s palms, causing her to tear her hands away from my cheeks. Good. I never, ever wanted her to touch me again.
“Jane. J-Josephine, I don’t know what you mean,” she whispered, with a stricken expression. “Tell me what it is.”
I stared at her for an uncomfortably long time until she finally had to look away and busy her stinging hands by putting the spoon in the sink and picking up my discarded cup. I was incensed.
“What it is?” I shouted, veins popping out of my neck like cords. “What it is is that today I found out that we’re not the only ones who go around from town to town using aliases and being freaks. For example, my history teacher, Ms. Smithburg? Today I found out that that isn’t really her name after all. Her real name might sound kind of familiar, though. I believe it’s Ruth Pike. Does that ring a bell?”
The cup fell from my mother’s hands and shattered, sending bits of broken bloodstained china in every direction. Seconds after the crash, my father came through the kitchen door, wearing flannel pajamas and a look of alarmed concern.
“What’s all the racket?” he demanded, running a hand through his wild bedhead.
“Oh, Jim,” my mother said. Her eyes were moist, which was easy for her, because she was normal as far as vampires go. She could make a teaspoon’s worth of tears when she really tried, unlike me on most days. On most days all I could do was wish that I was a slightly more ordinary version of a disgusting monster. And now I knew just who to blame for that.
“She told me everything,” I said. “She told me that I was as good as dead and that instead of letting me go, you decided to make me what you’d become so that we could be together forever. But what you didn’t know was that when a blood relative turns a blood relative, I’m what happens. An abomination who can barely live but can’t really catch a break and die either.” My mother covered her face with her hands as my father put a protective arm around her back, but I wasn’t finished. “You’ve spent so many years smothering me and being overprotective, and the crazy irony is that what I really could have used some protection against was my own mother! And Ma, you know the part that disgusts me most? It’s that you never had the guts to tell me the truth about what you did to me
.”
“Josephine,” my father said grimly, “that’s enough.”
“Daddy,” I whimpered, “how can you defend what she did to me? How can you—”
“Magpie,” he interrupted, leaving my mother’s side and coming toward me. My mother uncovered her face and caught his arm to stop him.
“Jim, no,” she said. He stopped and put his hand on her hand and squeezed it, nodding once, slight and sad. Then he looked me in the eye.
“Magpie,” he whispered. “Your mother didn’t do this to you. It was me. I’m the one who was too afraid to let you go. I’m the one who did it. I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.” I felt like the floor tilted and dropped away from me, and all I could hear was a sound like rushing water in my ears. My father closed in to hug me, but I threw off his arms, shaking my head.
“Don’t,” I said. “Please don’t touch me.” Though I’d felt despair more times than I cared to remember, it paled in comparison to the way I felt at that moment. For the first time, my soul felt as dead and cold as my static, necrotic heart. Everything I thought I knew was suddenly meaningless. I wanted out of there, but I had one piece of information I’d leave them with. I stared at the far wall and spoke to neither of them in particular.
“Ruth Pike found me because she needed to get to you,” I said flatly. “Her husband is sick and he needs the blood of a vampire that he created in order to be restored to health. They expect one of you to give your life in exchange for the wonderful gift they bestowed on you.”
Although I wasn’t looking directly at them, I couldn’t help noticing their sudden, extreme reaction. My parents whimpered and clutched at each other, but I stayed hard, not allowing myself to show any feeling. After learning that they’d not only destroyed my life but had also lied to me about it for three quarters of a century, why should I care that one of them might be in danger? Let them figure out how to handle it, because I was done.
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