Ordinary Problems of a College Vampire (Vampire Innocent Book 7)

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Okay. Cool. Tears I can handle. Just a dream.” I pace around, scratching the back of my head. “Guess since I’m not mourning the life I might’ve had anymore, the brain needs to torture me with other things.”

  She shrugs. “Nightmares are a natural process. Even I have them sometimes.”

  “Uhh…” I stop pacing and raise an eyebrow at her. “But, you’re a ghost.”

  “Yes. We rest. I am unable to explain the mechanism involved, but dreams are still an aspect of my existence. They are far more real than any dream I had in life. Perhaps because as a being of pure energy, I become the dream rather than experience it.”

  “Whoa. I haven’t had enough coffee yet today to think about that. Anyway, cool. Thanks for coming to help.” I glance at the mirror. “Did you hear me because I spoke at the mirror or because you have like a spiritual ear turned my way?”

  “Being near a mirror does make it easier, yes.”

  I blink. “Next thing, you’re going to tell me that Bloody Mary thing really happens.”

  She raises her eyebrows slightly, lips pursed. “Well, I will say that certain apparitions may occasionally be drawn to those who are opening themselves to the paranormal. However, to the best of my knowledge, ‘Bloody Mary’ isn’t one single entity. Sometimes, the visitor is friendly, other times, not so.”

  Okay, I’m kinda glad I never let Ash or ’Chelle talk me into doing that when we were little. I really need to make sure Sophia doesn’t try that now. “Umm… if Sophia does it, will bad things happen?”

  “That depends on what her expectations and desires are at that moment.”

  “She has magic…”

  Coralie nods. “That is a way of expressing it, yes.”

  “Does she need to like learn stuff? They don’t really have schools for it, do they?”

  “There are small groups, such as the Aurora Aurea here and there. Different mystical traditions abound. Far more have been lost to time than remain known to anyone alive, though that statement was true before my death. In your sister’s case, she is not an adherent of any particular ‘school’ so to speak.”

  “School?”

  “Such as voodoo, Thelema, Wicca, Sumerian demonology, and so on. There are some people who obtain what many would call ‘magic’ via the intercession of external beings. The mechanisms of action governing the interplay between said beings and humans often requires specific rituals, writings, gestures, and so on. Sophia’s power originates from within her. She does not need to follow any particular set of ‘rules’ for using her gift. Her desire is enough. But…” Coralie clasps her hands in front of her. “If she does utilize the trappings of an ‘established’ form of occultism, it could shape the effect she has on reality purely because it will alter what she believes will happen.”

  I nod, sorta getting the idea. “That’s where the imps came from, because they found that ‘spell’ online and it had demonic-ish overtones?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Umm. So, this mirror universe stuff, gateways, that damn troll… all of that is real?”

  Coralie nods.

  “How? I mean… no, not how. That’s way too long a question. If that stuff is real, why does everyone think magic is made up? Heck, I used to think that stuff was all fake.”

  She ponders, then gives me a blank look. “The world is far more paranormal than the collective consciousness of humanity is willing to accept. Whenever most people witness an event they cannot explain, their subconscious mind disregards it or fabricates a more logical explanation.”

  “That simultaneously makes sense and makes no sense.” I chuckle. “Do you think Sophia should get some kind of training? Like, would it be bad to let the mystics work with her? Or is it better to let her figure this stuff out on her own?”

  “Is it dangerous? Possibly.” She smiles. “But so, too would be leaving her to her own devices. It is not a good idea to give a child so young the ability to alter reality and leave them unsupervised. Especially for someone like her who is so easily startled. She has a gentle heart, and could be easily swayed by outside influences. Remember, our worst fears are what we make for ourselves.”

  Okay, that one leaves me scratching my head. “Umm… Oh, you mean like Fuzzydoom?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  I cringe. “Could she theoretically let that thing loose in the real world?”

  “Highly unlikely, at least any time soon. Perhaps, she may eventually understand her abilities sufficient to gather the power necessary to do such a thing, though I suspect it would require the use of a ley line nexus, or some other great source of spiritual energy.”

  None of that makes any sense to me, which means there’s no way Sophia would understand it. Gonna call that a no then. She won’t be able to summon Fuzzydoom. Unless, of course, she gets a dog and names it that. But there’s no way my parents will agree to a dog in the house. At least, not without me tampering with their heads… and I promised never to do that. The only way a pet would stay here is if it could turn invisible. Them allowing Sam to keep two frogs in a tank is a miracle already. If they ever find out my brother has an imp in his room, prank-ma-geddon from a couple weeks ago is going to look like amateur hour.

  Maybe I could convince them he’s more of a friend than a pet? Last time I checked, pets don’t hang out and play video games. Of course, my ’rents probably won’t be rational enough to accept any arguments if they discover him. Well, Dad might be okay with the idea. Mom will likely wallop the imp with her skillet.

  Lucky for him, he can stay invisible.

  3

  A Few Minutes of Forever

  Remember that thing about me promising not to use my powers of mind control on my parents?

  The next afternoon a little over an hour after I wake up, the temptation to cheat that promise rears up. A large pile of schoolwork sits in front of me, it’s about three-thirty on a Friday afternoon, and my mother wants me to take Sophia to her dance class. Several things help me keep my promise. One: she’s texting me. I haven’t yet figured out how to make vampiric powers work over an iPhone yet. Two: Sophia needs me and I care more about her than schoolwork. I’d say ‘Three: it’s daylight and my powers are offline’ but that’s not true as long as I stay in my windowless bedroom.

  I lean back in my chair, smiling at Mom’s text. She’s unable to get out of work early and Dad’s already left to take Sam and Sierra to taekwondo. After her ending up eyeball deep in imps, she’s become highly interested in learning how to fight. It hits me that I experienced my pre-death instinctual reaction to such a request from Mom—trying to dodge it. Whoa.

  Holy crap, maybe I’m coping.

  While the urge to duck out of having to take Soph to dance class happened, it’s easy to brush aside and help my kid sis.

  Holy crap, maybe I’m growing up.

  Ugh. I slump forward and bonk my head on the desk.

  Sunset time around now—mid November—is roughly ten minutes to five depending on cloud cover. Her dance class runs from four to five. My first class starts at six. I should have plenty of time to get to school if I fly. There is, however, another slight problem. I don’t have my own car and Dad will have the Sentra. I sit up again and text ‹Flying doesn’t work at this hour.›

  Mom replies with ‹Take the Sentra.›

  ‹Isn’t Dad using it?›

  ‹Lol! No. He picked up the new one today. Silver Sentra is officially yours.›

  Oh, yay. I should be thrilled, but… flying is way cooler than driving. My sense of independence isn’t dangling off a keyring, it’s dependent on the stupid sun going down. Still, they didn’t have to give me the car. It might be like ten years old, but free is free. ‹Awesome! Okay. I’ll take her.›

  Mom sends back an explosion of seemingly random emoticons. I swear, people over thirty don’t know how to text.

  Well, hmm. Can’t exactly work on the digital storage paper at the dance—crap! It’s due tonight. I’m going
to have to find a way to finish it at the dance studio. Mom’s fault, so I’m going to help myself to her laptop for the night. After saving the in-progress paper to the cloud, I throw on jeans and a T-shirt, then run upstairs. Sophia, evidently also in text-communication with Mom, waits near the front door already in her dance costume. Nothing fancy, just a plain black one-piece and white leggings. No recital or performance tonight, purely studio practice.

  She gives me a confused stare when I zoom past her and go upstairs. “Sare? You lost?”

  “Nope,” I yell. “One sec.”

  Mom’s laptop is set up on a little desk in the parents’ bedroom, thankfully at full charge. I grab the power cord in case of emergency and head back downstairs to throw on a coat. The chill doesn’t bother me that much, but I’d look out of place walking around outside in November without a coat on. Sophia bundles up in her coat with a scarf plus wool hat, and we head outside.

  The sky is in one of those bipolar type moods where it keeps going back and forth from kinda gloomy to kinda-not-gloomy. I feel like the hotdog at the very edge of the grill that only gets cooked on one side, so half of it is still fridge cold while the other half is too hot to bite. Thankfully, it’s not bright enough to cause serious pain or smoke. The light does, however, mess with my eyes, so after getting in the Sentra, I pull the sunglasses down from the window shade. I shouldn’t be this nervous about driving. Honestly, I’m not nervous about driving—I’m nervous about crashing since I’m kinda vulnerable right now. As far as Aurélie thinks, if I get hurt or killed while exploiting my ability to withstand low levels of sunlight, the injuries might become permanent or at least take a really damn long time to heal. Death, on the other hand, would likely be final.

  I never really worried about death before actually dying. Sounds weird to say, right? But, it’s not something people, especially people my age, think about. School shooting drills aside… those freaked me out. Still not sure if being murdered made me more aware of death than I’d been before, or if it’s simply that I’ve got quite a bit more time to lose now.

  “Dad got a new car today,” says Sophia after getting in.

  “Mom told me. What did he get?”

  She rolls her eyes. “Another Sentra I think. Something small.”

  I back out of the driveway and whirl around the cul-de-sac in reverse until facing out, then accelerate off down the road. “He barely drives, so he doesn’t need anything large. Surprised he didn’t get one of those smart car things.”

  “Those are too small. Dad could run over a squirrel and wind up in the hospital.”

  “Hah!”

  She eyes the backseat. “You’re stealing Mom’s laptop?”

  “I’ve got a paper due for a class tonight and I’ve kinda been putting it off to do other stuff because it’s super boring.”

  “Wow.” She blinks at me. “You’ve never slacked off on school stuff before. Is that a side-effect of the vampire thing?”

  “I haven’t been slacking on school stuff in general, just that project. The other things taking up my time are school related.”

  She shivers. “Okay, that’s just wrong. You can stay up all night and still can’t keep up with the work? Scary. Remind me not to study whatever you took.”

  “I’m backed up a bit over this stupid paper.” I nearly miss our turn due to being lost in a conversation, but manage to get over to the left in time without breaking any traffic laws or even making my sister cling to the door handle. “Wasted hours staring at the screen that I should’ve used doing other work. Thinking of changing my major.”

  “Why?”

  I spend the rest of the ride to the dance studio rambling about how boring it is to write a paper about data storage. Sophia cheers me up a bit by suggesting it isn’t computer science I’m bored with but history. Really though, it’s not even that. Certain history is fascinating. Writing about old hard drives that used to weigh half a ton isn’t. But, she’s got a point. Bad idea to let one dreadful assignment change my major. Unlike everyone else in that school, if I get a degree in a field that drives me crazy, it’s not going to be the end of the world.

  Living with my parents aside, my existence doesn’t rely on money for anything. My food can’t be purchased, and if it came down to it, finding a place to live would be as easy as a little minimally-invasive mind control. My plan is to stay home for as long as possible. The place might begin to feel weird after my parents grow old and pass on and the siblings all move out. Perhaps I’d want to be rid of it then to escape painful memories. Or what if one of the littles wants the house for their family? Would it be fair of me to keep lingering in the basement? Wait, no. They’ll all be grown up, moved out, and re-homed before Mom and Dad are gone. So, yeah, dibs on the house for as long as I can handle the memories associated with it.

  And there I go again, not acting my age.

  Dammit, I’m eighteen. I’m not supposed to have this much foresight at this age! I need to start making half-baked decisions that sound fun in the moment but bring heaping piles of regret down on me when least expected. Well, that didn’t quite work out for me too well last time, did it? Oh, I’ll just take my cheating boyfriend off alone into the woods at night to break up with him. What could possibly go wrong there?

  Sigh.

  We arrive at the shopping center at two minutes to four in the afternoon. As soon as the car comes to a stop, Sophia’s out the door and running for the studio before the engine is even off. Naturally, the sun decides to intensify at that exact moment, almost like it knew I got out of the car. The burn hurts, but it’s not quite bad enough to cause smoke. Grumbling, I grab the laptop and haul ass inside, mingling in among the various other parents seated in the ‘audience’ area.

  I’m a little surprised to see Mrs. Snow here. She’s the tiger mom who basically tortured her daughter Alexis. Figured that poor girl would’ve quit going once she had the opportunity to, but maybe it’s become fun to her since her mother is no longer driving her along like a manic Olympic coach hopped up on cocaine and Vicodin, desperate for one last shot at glory. I take an empty seat near the corner and cast a casual glance over the class, all doing warm-up stretches. Alexis is wearing a costume that’s still a bit too much on the skimpy side for a tween, but nowhere near as bad as what her mother had been encouraging her to wear before my brain corrections. Seriously… who encourages girls that young to show skin to get ahead in the dance world? Ugh. That’s just creepy.

  Everything seems normal with the class, so I take a spot in the corner, as far away from a window as possible, set up the laptop, and get to work on my paper that’s due in two hours. Ten minutes in, it’s pretty obvious this is not going to cut it. The only way this paper’s getting done in time is an absence of daylight. Or, there’s always mentally tweaking Professor Garcia to give me until Wednesday next week. Hmm. Possible, but I’d still have to endure the embarrassment of openly admitting to the whole class that I didn’t finish it when she collects the papers.

  Nah.

  I head to the bathroom, located in a short hallway near the back end of the dance floor. My hunch pans out and there aren’t any windows here. As soon as the door shuts behind me, the tingle of my vampire nature coming online washes over me. It’s not a huge bathroom, only three stalls, a counter with two sinks, plus a tiny sofa near the door. Something floral hangs in the air. The little couch is ideal. No need to take up a toilet.

  Boredom is a state of mind. I can choose to surrender to it or overcome it. Life has many tedious situations that can’t be avoided. Unlife is full of dangerous things that want to eat me, like a two-ton tarantula-scorpion whatever the hell that critter was. You know, boredom doesn’t seem all that bad. I’d much rather be sitting here writing a dryer-than-melba-toast report about ones and zeroes than ever seeing an abomination like that again.

  The world plunges into slow motion in response to me pushing my body to the limit of vampiric reflexes. Most normal undead use their powers for cool things
like racing up the sides of buildings, dodging or catching bullets out of midair, clawing the crap out of each other, that sort of thing.

  Me? I type at like 650 words a minute or some ridiculous number like that… probably even faster if the subject’s entertaining. Alas. Any mortal walking into the bathroom at the moment would probably hear buzzing rather than keyboard clicking. It does take some concentration on my part to only use speed and dexterity, not strength. Mom would be kinda mad at me if I punched my finger straight through her new laptop.

  Another weird thing happens… I’m having an easier time remembering all the research I did without having to look stuff up. Is that another little-known-of vampire perk or a side effect of staring at this crap for a whole week? Meh.

  In a little over twenty minutes, I finish a reasonable first draft of a fourteen-page paper. Dad once joked that he hated writing papers in school. A teacher would give him an assignment for a two- or three-thousand word project and he’d feel like he’d been sentenced to the guillotine. Now, for his job, he writes hundreds of thousands of words—granted, it’s program code—without batting an eye at it.

  Grunt work done, I get up and leave the bathroom, grimacing the instant sunlight shuts me down. Don’t get me wrong—feeling normal is amazing. But, the normal I want to feel is having a family, being home with them, and going about my life. ‘Losing my powers’ normal still sucks.

  Again seated in the waiting area, it’s time to proofread, which is a whole lot faster than trying to come up with crap to say about drive platters and file allocation algorithms. The two older women are in the midst of a conversation about their lack of success dating the theoretical, hunky Latin pool guy named Raul.

  Right. For once, going offline is a good thing. My sense of hearing isn’t abnormally acute. Alas, they’re still distracting enough that my brain spends more time trying to figure out if they seriously want to seduce a guy half their age or if they’re merely fantasizing. Before my frustration level builds to the point I get up to ask them, they switch topics to an upcoming Las Vegas trip the black-haired woman is planning next week.