First Bites

by Darren Shan

“What does that mean?” I asked, confused.

  “Vampires do not live forever,” he explained, “but we do live far longer than humans. We age at about one-tenth the regular rate. Which means, for every ten years that pass, we age one. As a half-vampire, you will age one year for every five.”

  “You mean, for every five years that pass, I’ll only be one year older?” I asked.

  “That is right.”

  “I dunno,” I muttered. “It sounds sketchy to me.”

  “It is your choice,” he said. “I cannot force you to become my assistant. If you decide it is not to your liking, you are free to leave.”

  “But Steve will die if I do that!” I cried.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “It is your assistance or his life.”

  “That’s not much of a choice,” I grumbled.

  “No,” he admitted, “it is not. But it is the only one I offer. Do you accept?”

  I thought it over. I wanted to say no, run away, and never return. But if I did, Steve would die. Was he worth such a deal? Did I feel guilty enough to offer my life for his? The answer was:

  Yes.

  “Okay,” I sighed. “I don’t like it, but my hands are tied. I just want you to know this: if I ever get the chance to betray you, I will. If the opportunity arises to pay you back, I’ll take it. You’ll never be able to trust me.”

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  “I mean it,” I warned him.

  “I know you do,” he said. “That is why I want you. A vampire’s assistant must have spirit. Your fighting quality is exactly what drew me to you. You will be a dangerous lad to have around, I am sure, but in a fight, when the chips are down, I am just as sure you will be a worthy ally.”

  I took a deep breath. “How do we do it?” I asked.

  He stood and pushed the table aside. Stepped forward until he was about a foot away. He seemed tall as a building. There was a foul smell to him that I hadn’t noticed before, the smell of blood.

  He raised his right hand and showed me the back of it. His nails weren’t especially long but they looked sharp. He raised his left hand and pressed the nails of the right into the fleshy tips of his left-hand fingers. Then he used his other set of nails to mark the right-hand fingers in the same way. He winced as he did it.

  “Lift your hands,” he grunted. I was watching the blood drip from his fingers and didn’t obey the command. “Now!” he yelled, grabbing my hands and jerking them up.

  He dug his nails into the soft tips of my fingers, all ten of them at once. I cried out with pain and fell back, tucking my hands in at my sides, rubbing them against my jacket.

  “Do not be such a baby,” he jeered, tugging my hands free.

  “It hurts!” I howled.

  “Of course it does.” He laughed. “It hurt me too. Did you think becoming a vampire was easy? Get used to the pain. Much of it lies ahead.”

  He put a couple of my fingers in his mouth and sucked some blood out. I watched as he rolled it around his mouth, testing it. Finally he nodded and swallowed. “It is good blood,” he said. “We can proceed.”

  He pressed his fingers against mine, wound to wound. For a few seconds there was a numb feeling at the ends of my arms. Then I felt a gushing sensation and realized my blood was moving from my body to his through my left hand, while his blood was entering mine through my right.

  It was a strange, tingling feeling. I felt his blood travel up my right arm, then down the side of my body and over to the left. When it reached my heart there was a stabbing pain and I almost collapsed. The same thing was happening to Mr. Crepsley and I could see him grinding his teeth and sweating.

  The pain lasted until Mr. Crepsley’s blood crept down my left arm and started flowing back into his body. We remained joined for a couple more seconds, until he broke free with a shout. I fell backward to the floor. I was dizzy and felt sick.

  “Give me your fingers,” Mr. Crepsley said. I looked across and saw him licking his. “My spit will heal the wounds. You will lose all your blood and die otherwise.”

  I glanced down at my hands and saw blood leaking out. Stretching them forth, I let the vampire put them in his mouth and run his rough tongue over the tips.

  When he released them, the flow had stopped. I wiped the leftover blood off on a rag. I studied my fingers and noted they now had ten tiny scars running across them.

  “That is how you recognize a vampire,” Mr. Crepsley told me. “There are other ways to change a human but the fingers are the simplest and least painful method.”

  “Is that it?” I asked. “Am I a half-vampire now?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I don’t feel any different,” I told him.

  “It will take a few days for the effects to become apparent,” he said. “There is always a period of adjustment. The shock would be too great otherwise.”

  “How do you become a full vampire?” I asked.

  “The same way,” he said, “only you stay joined longer, so more of the vampire’s blood enters your body.”

  “What will I be able to do with my new powers?” I asked. “Will I be able to change into a bat?”

  His laughter rocked the room. “A bat!” he shrieked. “You do not believe those silly stories, do you? How on Earth could somebody the size of you or I turn into a tiny flying rat? Use your brain, boy. We can no more turn into bats, rats, or fog than we can turn into ships, planes, or monkeys!”

  “So what can we do?” I asked.

  He scratched his chin. “There is too much to explain right now,” he said. “We must tend to your friend. If he does not get the antidote before tomorrow morning, the serum will not work. Besides, we have plenty of time to discuss secret powers.” He grinned. “You could say we have all the time in the world.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  MR. CREPSLEY LED THE WAY up the stairs and out of the building. He walked confidently through the darkness. I thought I could see a bit better than I could when coming in, but that might just have been because my eyes were used to the dark, not because of the vampire blood in my veins.

  Once outside, he told me to hop up on his back. “Keep your arms wrapped around my neck,” he said. “Do not let go or make any sudden movements.”

  As I was getting up, I looked down and saw he was wearing slippers. I thought it was strange but didn’t say anything.

  When I was on his back, he started running. I didn’t notice anything strange at first, but soon began to realize how fast buildings were zipping by. Mr. Crepsley’s legs didn’t seem to be moving that quickly.

  Instead, it was as if the world was moving faster and we were slipping past it!

  We reached the hospital in a couple of minutes. Normally it would have taken twenty minutes, and that was if you sprinted all the way.

  “How did you do that?” I asked, sliding down.

  “Speed is relative,” he said, tugging his red cloak tight around his shoulders, pulling back into the shadows so we could not be seen, and that was all the answer he gave.

  “Which room is your friend in?” he asked.

  I told him Steve’s room number. He looked up, counting windows, then nodded and told me to hop back up on his back. When I was in position, he walked over to the wall, took off his slippers, and laid his fingers and toes against the wall. Then he shoved his nails forward—into the brick!

  “Hmmm,” he muttered. “It is crumbly but it will hold us. Do not panic if we slip. I know how to land on my feet. It takes a very long fall to kill a vampire.”

  He climbed up the wall, digging his nails in, moving a hand forward, then a foot, then the other hand and foot, one after the other. He moved quickly and within moments we were at Steve’s window, crouching on the ledge, gazing in.

  I wasn’t sure of the time, but it was very late. Nobody was in the room except for Steve. Mr. Crepsley tried the window. It was locked. He laid the fingers of one hand beside the glass covering the latch, then clicked the fingers of his other hand
.

  The latch sprang open! He shoved the window up and stepped inside. I got down from his back. While he checked the door, I examined Steve. His breathing was more ragged than it had been and there were new tubes all over his body, hooked up to menacing-looking machines.

  “The poison has worked rapidly,” Mr. Crepsley said, gazing down at him over my shoulder. “We might be too late to save him.” I felt my insides turn to ice at his words.

  Mr. Crepsley bent over and rolled up one of Steve’s eyelids. For a few long seconds he stared at the eyeball and held Steve’s right wrist. Finally he grunted.

  “We are in time,” he said, and I felt my heart lifting. “But it is a good thing you did not wait any longer. A few more hours and he would have been a goner.”

  “Just get on with it and cure him,” I snapped, not wanting to know how close to death my best friend had come.

  Mr. Crepsley reached into one of his many pockets and produced a small glass vial. He turned on the bedside lamp and held the bottle up to the light to examine the serum. “I must be careful,” he told me. “This antidote is almost as lethal as the poison. A couple of drops too many and…” He didn’t need to finish.

  He tilted Steve’s head to one side and told me to hold it that way. He leaned one of his nails against the flesh of Steve’s neck and made a small cut. Blood oozed out. He stuck his finger over it, then removed the cork of the bottle with his other hand.

  He lifted the vial to his mouth and prepared to drink. “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “It must be passed on by mouth,” he said. “A doctor could inject it but I do not know about needles and the like.”

  “Is that safe?” I asked. “Won’t you pass on germs?”

  Mr. Crepsley grinned. “If you want to call a doctor, feel free,” he said. “Otherwise, have some faith in a man who was doing this long before your grandfather was born.”

  He poured the serum into his mouth, then rolled it from side to side. He leaned forward and covered the cut with his lips. His cheeks bulged out, then in, as he blew the serum into Steve.

  He sat back when he was finished and wiped around his mouth. He spat the last of the fluid onto the floor. “I am always afraid of swallowing that stuff by accident,” he said. “One of these nights, I am going to take a course and learn how to do this the easy way.”

  I was about to reply, but then Steve moved. His neck flexed, then his head, then his shoulders. His arms twitched and his legs started to jerk. His face creased up and he began to moan.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, afraid that something had gone wrong.

  “It is all right,” Mr. Crepsley said, putting away the bottle. “He was on the brink of death. The journey back is never a pleasant one. He will be in pain for some time, but he will live.”

  “Will there be any side effects?” I asked. “He won’t be paralyzed from the waist down or anything?”

  “No,” Mr. Crepsley said. “He will be fine. He will feel a bit stiff and will catch colds very easily, but otherwise he will be the same as he was before.”

  Steve’s eyes shot open suddenly and focused on me and Mr. Crepsley. A puzzled look swept across his face and he tried speaking. But his mouth wouldn’t work, and then his eyes went blank and closed again.

  “Steve?” I called, shaking him. “Steve?”

  “That is going to happen a lot,” Mr. Crepsley said. “He will be slipping in and out of consciousness all night. By morning he should be awake and by afternoon he will be sitting up and asking for dinner.

  “Come,” he said. “Let us go.”

  “I want to stick around a while longer, to make sure he recovers,” I replied.

  “You mean you want to make sure I have not tricked you.” Mr. Crepsley laughed. “We will come back tomorrow and you will see that he is fine. We really must go now. If we stay any—”

  All of a sudden, the door opened and a nurse walked in!

  “What’s going on here?” she shouted, stunned to see us. “Who the hell are—”

  Mr. Crepsley reacted quickly, grabbing Steve’s bedcovers and throwing them over the nurse. She fell down as she tried to remove the sheets, getting her hands stuck in their folds.

  “Come,” Mr. Crepsley hissed, rushing to the window. “We have to leave immediately.”

  I stared at the hand he was holding out, then at Steve, then at the nurse, then at the open door.

  Mr. Crepsley lowered his hand. “I see,” he said in a bleak voice. “You are going to go back on our deal.” I hesitated, opened my mouth to say something, then—acting without thinking—turned and made a dash for the door!

  I thought he would stop me, but he did nothing, only howled after me as I ran: “Very well. Run, Darren Shan! It will do you no good. You are a creature of the night now. You are one of us! You will be back. You will come crawling on your knees, begging for help. Run, fool, run!”

  And he began to laugh.

  His laughter followed me through the corridor, down the stairs, and out the front door. I kept glancing over my shoulder as I ran, expecting him to swoop down on me, but there was no sign of him on the way home, not a glimpse or a smell or a sound.

  All that remained of him was his laughter, which echoed through my brain like a witch’s cackling curse.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  I ACTED SURPRISED WHEN MOM GOT off the phone that Monday morning and told me Steve had recovered. She was excited and did a little dance with me and Annie in the kitchen.

  “He snapped out of it by himself?” Dad asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “The doctors can’t understand it, but nobody’s complaining!”

  “Incredible,” Dad muttered.

  “Maybe it’s a miracle,” Annie said, and I had to turn my head aside to hide my smile. Some miracle!

  While Mom went off to see Mrs. Leonard, I started out for school. I was half-afraid the sunlight would burn me when I left the house, but of course it didn’t. Mr. Crepsley had told me I would be able to move around during the day.

  I wondered, from time to time, if it had been a bad dream. It seemed crazy, looking back. Deep down I knew it was real, but I tried believing otherwise, and sometimes almost did.

  The part I hated most was the thought of being stuck in this body for so long. How would I explain it to Mom and Dad and everybody else? I’d look silly after a couple of years, especially at school, stuck in a class with people who looked older than me.

  I went to visit Steve on Tuesday. He was sitting up, watching TV, eating a box of chocolates. He was delighted to see me and told me about his stay in the hospital, the food, the games nurses brought him to play with, the presents that were piling up.

  “I’ll have to get bitten by poisonous spiders more often,” he joked.

  “I wouldn’t make a habit of it if I were you,” I told him. “You might not get well next time.”

  He studied me thoughtfully. “You know, the doctors are baffled,” he said. “They don’t know what made me sick and they don’t know how I recovered.”

  “You didn’t tell them about Madam Octa?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “There didn’t seem much point. It would have meant trouble for you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What happened to her?” he asked. “What did you do with her after she bit me?”

  “I killed her,” I lied. “I got mad and stomped her to death.”

  “Really?” he asked.

  “Really.”

  He nodded slowly, never taking his eyes off me. “When I first woke up,” he said, I thought I saw you. I must have been mistaken, because it was the middle of the night. But it was a lifelike dream. I even thought I saw someone with you, tall and ugly, dressed in red, with orange hair and a long scar down the left side of his face.”

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I looked down at the floor and squeezed my hands together.

  “Another funny thing,” he said. “The nurse who discovered me awake swore there
were two people in the room, a man and a boy. The doctors think it was her mind playing tricks and said it doesn’t matter. Strange, though, isn’t it?”

  “Very strange,” I agreed, unable to look him in the eye.

  I began noticing changes in myself over the next couple of days. I found it hard getting to sleep when I went to bed, and kept waking in the middle of the night. My hearing improved and I was able to hear people talking from far away. In school, I could listen to voices from the next two rooms, almost as if there were no walls between my class and theirs.

  I began to get in better shape. I was able to run around the yard during break and lunch without working up a sweat. Nobody could keep up with me. I was also more aware of my body and was able to control it. I could make a soccer ball do pretty much what I wanted, dribbling around opponents at will. I scored sixteen goals on Thursday.

  I grew stronger, too. I was able to do push-ups and pull-ups now, as many as I liked. I didn’t have new muscles—none that I could see—but there was a strength flowing through me that hadn’t been there before. I had yet to test it properly but I believed it might be immense.

  I tried hiding my new talents but it was difficult. I explained away the running and soccer skills by saying I was exercising and practicing a lot more, but other things were trickier.

  Like when the bell rang on Thursday at the end of lunch. The ball had just been kicked into the air by the goalie who I’d put sixteen goals past. It was coming toward me, so I stuck up my right hand to catch it. I did, but as I squeezed, my nails sunk in and burst it!

  And when I was eating dinner at home that night, I wasn’t concentrating. I could hear our next-door neighbors having a fight and I was listening to their argument. I was eating french fries and hot dogs, and after a while I noticed the food was tougher than it should have been. I glanced down and realized I’d bitten the head off the fork and was chewing it to pieces! Luckily, no one saw, and I was able to slip it into the wastebasket as I was washing up.

  Steve called that night. He’d been let out of the hospital. He was supposed to take things easy for a few days and not come to school until after the weekend, but he said he was going crazy with boredom and had persuaded his mother to let him come tomorrow.