by Diana Graves
I brought my hand to my chest, just then remembering the vial, the useless piece of shit vial that I had made. It hadn’t worked, big surprise that. It wasn’t there. The fire must have burnt through the hemp.
“Looks like the vampire cauterized the wound on your arm for us,” Tristan said.
“What happened, Tristan?”
“I don’t know. When we got to Nick the vampire was feeding on him and we thought he was dead.” His eyes were swimming in tears. I put my hand on his shoulder and he flinched.
“You killed it, Tristan.” I had meant for it to be a comforting fact, but Tristan’s whole body became very still. Decent elves don’t kill, its taboo, even in self-defense. Nick, Tristan and I were raised to be both practicing witches and elves. Nick and I never took any of the high and mighty elf stuff seriously but Tristan did. “I’m sorry,” I stammered, but my apology was ignored and my intent was taken as cruelty. He threw the rag he had used to clean me into the puddle of blood and water that had accumulated at my feet.
“I’m sorry, Tristan,” I said again, but he ignored me still. He tore a strip of white cloth from a shirt and tied it around my forearm recklessly before he stood and walked away. “I need to check on Nicholas,” he said with his back to me.
I stared after him for a moment, cursing my tactlessness. Michael and Tristan were huddle on the other side of the fire, looking down at something I couldn’t see from where I sat. When I knew I could stand under my own strength I got up and walked over to them, and found Nicholas lying on the ground between them. Michael was bent over him, cleaning his wounds with water and cloth torn from his own shirt, and Tristan was bandaging his wounds. Katie stood far from the boys, her hands over her mouth, quietly crying.
Tears welled up in my eyes. “Nick,” I cried softly. I knelt down at his side. The vampire had ravaged his body. His flesh hung in red ribbons, his innards leaked from his stomach. The smell of raw meat and bile was overpowering. Nicked looked up at us, helpless, asking us with his eyes to save him, to help him somehow.
“Oh, Nick, no,” I cried. “Do you know any magic that can fix him, Tristan?” I asked, but he didn’t answer me. “Tristan?”
“Do you?!” he spat. His face was so enraged that I flinched.
“No,” I whispered. There was nothing I could do but watch him die. I didn’t look away from Nick’s face though. That would be cowardly. I took in his large brown eyes, full of such pain, such hopelessness. He gasped for air, spitting out blood and choking on it. I grabbed his hand and squeezed tight. “I’m so sorry Nick, I love you so much. I’m so sorry.” His body trembled and then it became still, lifeless. His hand became a cold weight in mine. A shudder ran through Tristan as he looked down at his little brother with eyes red from crying.
“Nick!” Michael screamed hysterically.
I wanted to scream wordlessly at the sky, I wanted to curse the gods. Instead I wrapped my good arm around Michael. He looked at me with a face torn by absolute grief. I would stay strong for him. My burns hurt like hell, but I had to ignore the pain.
Tristan’s face looked hard and bitter. He turned to me, putting all that pain and all that anger on me. I had to look away. “We need to leave here,” I said to the ground.
“Yes, we need to get to a hospital,” said Katie softly. “I’ll start loading stuff up.”
“Quickly!” Tristan yelled at her. We all flinched.
“Ok,” Michael said, and he walked to the boy’s tent and grabbed his bag before climbing into the hearse.
“What are we going to do with Nick?” Katie asked. Her words were almost too quiet to hear.
“We take him with us,” Tristan said. He looked around the camp site, “Do we have anything to wrap him up in—a tarp maybe?”
“I’ll get my sleeping bag,” I said.
“Katie will get your sleeping bag,” Tristan corrected me. Katie did so without a word. They bent down over Nicholas and after trying for some time they finally got him into the bag. I tried to help them, but they wouldn’t let me, so I went to hearse and took a seat in the front beside Michael. I pretended I wasn’t crying while Katie and Tristan struggled to get Nicholas’s body into the hearse. Michael didn’t pretend anything. He let out great big sobs of pain, hit the dashboard hard with his fists and screamed at his god.
4:
WITH THE HEARSE packed we raced down the mountain. I wasn’t sure Tristan knew where he was going. Nick was the one who knew these roads like the back of his hand, but I didn’t say as much. I didn’t care about anything in that moment. Everyone save for Michael was quiet. I was too focused on the pain to care if we got lost, but we didn’t have a chance to. Only a couple miles from the camp site two police SUV’s, and a dirty blue jeep road up fast and blocked our path.
Katie had somehow landed herself in the back of the hearse with Nick’s body, which slid into her when Tristan hit the brakes.
“Tristan!” she shouted.
Michael and I looked to Tristan. His eyes were wide, “Holy shit.” My sentiments exactly.
“What the hell,” Katie said when she saw the three vehicles in our path.
A tall broad shouldered man jumped down from the jeep. His clothes reminded me of Indiana Jones but his skin was several shades darker. He had long black curls, bright blue eyes, and the wrinkles on his face gave him character, not just years. The police stayed in their SUVs.
“We’ve been tracking a—,” the man began to announce before he caught sight of me. His voice was so deep it was a little off-putting. I looked down at myself. I was still covered in blood, ash and burns. I would say I deserved a lingering look or two. “Please, step out of the vehicle,” the man asked.
#
The man’s name was Ruy, Ruy the vampire hunter. He stood a few yards from me with two officers by his side. They questioned Tristan and Katie, while two other officers examined Nick and Michael.
“Was the vampire injured when he bit into your arm?” asked Officer Ranger, the police woman that examined me. I nodded. “Where were the vampire’s injuries?” she asked. She was a tall woman with short light red hair styled in a trendy bob that fanned out from under her hat. She didn’t wear any makeup, but she still managed to look breathtaking. I usually didn’t wear makeup either, but that was because I felt like a clown in it.
“Um, his lips were pretty much gone,” I said. “I thought he was a zombie—at first.”
She frowned, “Sometimes vampires in a rage will bite right threw their lips. Look up.” She had a small flashlight in her hand, and shined it in my eyes. “Have your eyes always been red?”
“Yes.” She nodded while she wrote in her notebook.
She took a disposable thermometer from her kit that sat on the driver’s seat of her SUV. “Please open your mouth.” I did, and she placed the little plastic stick under my tongue. “I’m going to look at your wounds while we wait, is that alright?” I nodded. She lifted the bandages gently and then quickly scribbled some notes, but she frowned when she took the thermometer out of my mouth and put it in a plastic baggy. I opened the empathic part of me. It was like flexing a weak muscle. My eyes narrowed with the effort of it, and suddenly I could read her. People never feel just one emotion at a time. It’s like treading water in a deep dark ocean. There are things deep down that I could never touch, that my mind could never guess at. But at the surface, she felt confused.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She looked back down at her notes, “It’s just that you said this attack took place less than an hour ago.”
“Yeah, maybe forty minutes or so.”
“This doesn’t make sense.—Come with me.”
I followed her to Ruy and the other officers. The officer that had examined Michael was there, and the few people I could read were already confused before we got there to talk about whatever had confused Officer Ranger.
One officer wasn’t confused, he was flat out scared. “That young man is turning, very fast, very, very fast. We
need to get them to the VCC, like an hour ago,” he said to Ruy as we walked up.
“The attack just took place, I think we have time to—,” Ruy began.
“No,” the officer cut him off. “Michael has all the signs of the infected in early stages of the turning process. He has a high fever, light sensitivity, advanced healing on his wound and he’s becoming increasingly aggressive.”
“Aggressive?” Tristan and Katie both asked in almost perfect unison.
“Michael doesn’t have an aggressive bone in his body,” I said.
Ranger showed Ruy her notes and his eyes darted to me.
“Curious,” he said. “She has advanced healing of wounds but no light sensitivity, fever or aggression.”
“Wait, just wait a damn minute. Are you saying that Michael is turning into a vampire over that little bite?” Katie yelled.
“It only takes one bite,” Officer Ranger said to Katie before she turned back to Ruy. “I’ve never seen this. Not just the quickness in which the disease is taking hold, but the girl is healing like a vampire without the other symptoms.”
“What do you think?” he asked.
“Nenet?” suggested an officer in plain clothes with his badge around his neck.
“Yes, we should get to town as Officer Peterson suggested, like an hour ago,” Ranger said. She turned to the other officers, “Peterson, Redding, I want you two to get back to the camp site and finish processing. Ruy and I will take them to town.”
Peterson said, “Yes Sir.” He felt relieved. Little old Michael couldn’t be that scary.
“I’ll take Michael. Will you be okay driving the hearse?” Ranger asked Tristan.
“Yes, I’ll follow you guys.”
“Your other brother will remain in the back of the hearse for now. I don’t have that kind of room in the back of my SUV and quite honestly the less he’s moved the better.”
“When will we know if he will come back?” I asked.
“The doctor should be able to tell us more once we get to the VCC,” she said.
“What’s a VCC?” asked Katie
“It’s a Vampire Care Center. It’s the place all newly infected go to spend their first few days as a vampire, so that shit like this doesn’t happen,” I answered quickly and turned back to Officer Ranger. “Am I okay to ride with Tristan?”
“I honestly don’t know. I’ll let Ruy call it.”
I looked to Ruy. He was sitting in his jeep, ready to go but not out of ear shot. He looked me over.
“If anyone should be turning it should be you, but you don’t even have light sensitivity and that’s one of the first symptoms.” He looked down at the notes Ranger made and then back up at me. “I think you’re safe riding with your brother. But, the sooner we get to the clinic the better,” he said before he started his engine.
Michael made a huge scene about Katie riding with Nick’s body when Ranger tried to get him in the back of her SUV. He did look scary. The color left his skin, and unreasonable anger distorted his usually lovely face into something ugly and not at all friendly.
“He could wake and kill her!” Michael screamed.
“Not during the day and not this soon after infection.”
“But you said I’m turning and his injuries are worse and so are Raina’s, and they’re both going to be riding with my little sister!”
“Sir,” Ranger tried to reason. “The body is dead and no matter how potent your strain of disease is, he’s not waking in less than an hour and Raina shows almost no signs of infection. I assure you that your sister is safer riding with them than she is riding with us.”
Eventually we gave in to Michael’s hysterics and Katie jumped into Ruy’s jeep, but Michael was still arguing with Ranger when we drove away. I’d never seen Michael so…crazed.
Ruy was a horrible driver but we followed as best we could. On a dirt road the man was driving at least forty-five miles an hour or more. There were so many twists and turns that I lost count. I didn‘t know how Tristan stayed on his tail through all the dirt and rocks the jeep shot into the air. But, it wasn’t too long before we drove past a large wood sign with the word “Darkness” carved into it.
I looked at Tristan, who was driving attentively. “Darkness?” I yelled over the sound of the engine. Tristan spared a quick glance at me. “I saw,” he said. That was all I was going to get from him until Ruy slowed a bit so Tristan could relax enough to focus on something other than the road.
I’d studied Darkness in my Preternatural American History class. Darkness was a vampire town with one massive collective. Usually there are loads of vamp collectives in a city. They have no more authority than the YMCA or Chucky Cheeses, but this town was a collective, with all of the authority. This was going to be interesting.
Eventually we drove into the town, Darkness. It was a startling contrast to the overgrown forests. There were large dark buildings with perfectly manicured lawns and towering trees. Most of the buildings were made from logs or stone, and they were designed with both American Indians and Gothic Europe in mind. The town looked like a strange mix of the Victorian era meets the Pacific Northwest. Most unexpectedly, there were actually a lot of people going about their business. But, not too many humans; ogres, trolls, satyrs and lycanthropes mostly. Once we entered the town Ruy slowed to a coasting ten miles an hour.
“Bloody Mary’s Corner,” Tristan said without inflection, as though he simply had to comment on it, but couldn’t really take joy in it. I knew how he felt. Under different circumstances I would have loved to be here. It was a comfortable, culturally rich and sometimes silly place, and here we were with heavy minds and pained hearts.
I gave him a shallow nod, and pointed to the huge amphitheater that sat just beyond the shallow river that ran through Darkness. There was a round stage and stone seating all around it. I stared at it with my forehead pressed against the window. The cool glass felt good on my burns. Once a year the Native Vampires of Darkness put on a play depicting how Darkness came into being.
When the Europeans first came to the Americas they didn’t find any indigenous vampires, so they declared that vampirism was an old world disease, but they were wrong. The vampires that were here kept themselves hidden; terribly large families of vampires. But the European explorers eventually did find most of the vampire nests, and hunted them down to near extinction. The Europeans were ruthless in this, as in most things. They drove the vampires even farther into hiding. Darkness was one of the few tribes that escaped the hunt. There were two vampire tribes, Snoho on the west side of Mount Rainer and Wana on the east. Snoho had a chief, Melvern the great, but Wana had a female leader, Olathia the beautiful. When word of the European explorers came, they decided to join together under a duo-mastership on the mountain and become hidden more so than ever to the world. They became darkness it’s self. That is how the vampire tribe survived, together in darkness. At least, that was until they were discovered in the nineteen-fifties, well after the Native Vampire Treaty was established. And, although there was a restriction set on how big a collective could become, a grandfather clause was made for Darkness and the other lost vampire nests. It allows them to take in as many vampires as they would like under one master vampire’s rule. Since this towns discovery it has slowly been brought into these times of law, order and the American way. It was almost sad how Americanized it had become. I’d seen pictures of it in one of my text books. It was all log cabins, very green and lush. Now it was little more than a tourist trap. Pity.
Embracing our culture didn’t mean anything for them. The Native vampires might have distorted their old ways of life for economic gain, but their memory of an America before European settlers was a precious thing. That no native vampire has granted an interview with a historian says just how much anger toward us they still carried. How do you build trust with a people whose memories of their loved ones being hunted down and slaughtered are still fresh in their minds?
Tristan continued to point out t
he strange names of things in a shallow dead voice as we followed Ruy closely; “Dark Ally’s BooX, Bite Me Street, Chains of Death Candy & Gift Shop.”
Yeah, Darkness was definitely a tourist town, but I knew there was something old and important here. Behind all the dramatically dark paint and cliché horror novel appearance was something to take serious, having a sort of beautiful danger to it. Like a large spider, you’re scared but at the same time you can’t help but stare in awe.
“We’re on Artery Boulevard,” Tristan said quietly, “Funny.” He moved his head, as if to look back at Nick, but stopped himself. Nick would have loved this place. He would have smiled wide and had some clever comments to say. I thought Tristan had been talking to me, but perhaps he was talking to Nick this whole time. I looked back at Nick’s body wrapped in my sleeping bag, and my whole body clenched with the effort to not cry wildly. I had to look away.
The public buildings, which were placed farther down the main road, were quite plain in comparison to the shops and houses we’d seen so far. The police station, court house and the other such buildings were beautiful and majestic in their own way but not flashy. They were made in the same fashion; with black stone and dark woods. They looked classy.
Ruy turned on his turning signal and parked the jeep in a diagonal parking space in front of a building with large Gothic lettering that read, “Darkness Clinic.” We followed suite, taking the parking spot to his right.
“What’s that?” asked Katie as she stepped down from Ruy’s jeep.
“What?” Tristan asked as he and I made our way to the side walk.
She pointed at a building at the end of the main road. It was a wood castle with gigantic native designs painted in red. The wood had blackened with age and no windows. A thick black metal gate stood between the road and the building. The whole image made my skin crawl.
