“He’s out looking for Peter,” Jack answered, and Mae looked over at him.
She was fidgeting with a wavy strand of her hair, and I knew that she desperately wanted to touch mine. I had still been holding my water glass, which was almost empty, and I set it on the island and sighed.
“So… you’re vampires?” I asked, feeling incredibly foolish. It sounded so stupid coming out of my mouth. This was a family of normal, healthy people, and there were no such things as vampires.
“Yes, love.” Mae smiled at me, and it had to be the saddest, most terrified smile I’d ever seen. They were waiting on edge, and I didn’t understand why.
They were the big powerful vampires, and I was just one small human girl. If anyone should be scared, it should be me.
“All of you?” I looked from Mae to Jack, who just nodded solemnly. “Then why did you say that it would be better if Ezra or Peter were here? Don’t you know just as much?”
“They’re older, much older,” Mae explained, and her strained expression started to relax a bit. “Jack is barely more than a fledgling.”
“Nobody calls them fledglings,” Jack grumbled, offended at her use of the term.
“How old are you?” I remembered the first time I had asked him that, when we were waiting in the booth at the diner, and the way he had laughed at the question. This time, he just answered me, carefully meeting my gaze.
“Well, um, I was twenty-four when I turned, and that was sixteen years ago. So I guess that makes me forty.”
“You don’t seem forty,” I pointed out and he laughed at that, which went a long way to alleviate the tension in the room.
“Vampires age differently, obviously.” Jack gestured to his bare chest, which did not look a day over twenty-four.
“Physically, we don’t age much at all,” Mae elaborated. “Emotionally we mature in a much different rate. When you first turn, you’ll almost regress emotionally. Everything changes so much. Ezra knows more about the exact reasoning of everything, but from my own experience, it’s very much like being a teenager all over again. Jack’s personality is closer to that of someone in their teens than of one in their twenties.”
“Thanks,” Jack smirked.
“Part of that has to do with Jack’s personality,” Mae smiled at him. “But part of it is his age. And since our minds always stay sharp, we don’t ever really get old. We learn from our experiences and we mature, but not the same way people do. Jack will never really act like a man in his forties, no matter how old he gets.”
“I probably have a Peter Pan complex anyway,” Jack shrugged.
In retrospect, a lot of what he did made sense when I thought of him as being more about Milo’s age. Well, my age actually, which is why it never seemed creepy that he was hanging out with me, even though he was older. He never acted older. He was, after all, at my maturity level.
“How old are you?” I turned to Mae.
“I was twenty-eight when I turned, and that was… wow, that was fifty-two years ago.” She looked a little surprised herself, as if she hadn’t thought about in awhile, and then smiled at me. “So, I’m eighty. Wow. Well, that’s not as bad as Peter or Ezra.”
“How old are they?’ I couldn’t help but lean in close, scrutinizing Mae’s perfect porcelain skin. It was hard to believe that she’d even been twenty-eight.
“Oh, gosh.” Mae looked over at Jack for help, but he just shook his head.
“I only know the age they were when they turned, cause that’s how old I tell people the are.” Jack had been leaning forward onto the island, but now he stood up and leaned back on the kitchen counter behind him, crossing his arms over his chest. “Peter’s nineteen and Ezra’s twenty-six. You’re the oldest.”
“Thanks,” Mae gave him a wry look, then turned back to me. “Well, Peter’s not quite two-hundred. Like maybe one-ninety or something like that.
And Ezra is… Gosh, it’s so horrible that I don’t know how old my own husband is.
Oh! Yeah, Jack, you remember! We had that big party a few years back when he turned three-hundred? When was that?”
“I don’t know,” Jack shrugged. “Like… five years ago? I don’t know. Time’s really hard to keep track of anymore.”
“I know. That happens.” She scrunched her face, trying to think, but then just gave up. “Ezra’s just over three hundred. Maybe three-oh-four? I can’t say with certainty.”
“You’re telling me that Ezra is over 300 years old?” Ezra, who had to be one of the most perfectly attractive people I’ve ever seen and drove a Lamborghini. He’d been around for over three centuries. I had never felt so small or insignificant in my entire life.
“Yep. I’m the baby. By a lot.” Jack grinned broadly, and part of that made sense. Ezra and Peter’s eyes looked so much older, and everyone seemed to kind of indulge Jack the same way you would indulge the baby of the family.
“But you call them your brothers, and they can’t be.” I remembered when I asked Jack about it being a fraternity, and slowly, it dawned on me what I had said first that had made him laugh. They’re blood relatives.
“Not in the human sense, no,” Mae explained. “But as vampires… brothers still isn’t exactly the right word.” She looked back over at Jack. “You understand this better than I do. I’ve never…” She trailed off, and there was something sad in that.
“It’s hard to explain until it happens to you, or if you don’t know the person that turned you,” Jack took a step towards the island and nodded at Mae.
“I never really knew who turned me.” Her eyes were infinitely sad, and she lowered her gaze.
“See, Ezra turned Peter, and Peter turned me.” He laid his hands flat on the countertop and watched me, gauging my response to everything they were telling me.
“You mean Peter turned you into a vampire?”
Whenever I said the word vampire, I felt like a complete tool. Like I was in a bad horror movie or I was being Punk’d or something. It just wasn’t a possibility. I was having this conversation because it was like when I had a dream and everyone was made of cotton candy or something. I just kind of went along with it. Once I suspended my belief, I just had to go with the flow and pretend like everything made sense.
“Yeah.” He nodded.
“So what does that mean? He bit you?” Just the thought of Peter biting anyone made my heart rate speed up. That’s what he’d been trying to do when I was in his room, and even now, knowing exactly what he meant to do, it somehow made me want him more.
“No, biting doesn’t do anything,” Jack shook his head, but he raised an eyebrow and gave me an odd look. Then it dawned on me.
“You can hear my heartbeat.” When we had been in the car, right before the accident, my heart had been racing like mad because I was thinking about Peter, and it had been distracting Jack.
“We can hear your blood,” Mae corrected me.
“And when you…” Jack’s expression changed, and he looked away from me, but I could already feel his desire.
“You’re thinking of Peter,” Mae caught Jack’s response. My cheeks reddened, because it was so embarrassing that the vampires find out that I have a crush on one of them. That was my big concern right now. “You release a kind of pheromone when you’re… ready. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Basically, it entices us to bite you,” Jack said bluntly.
My heart had slowed, but he still looked strained. Meanwhile, Mae didn’t look effected by it at all.
“So… is it just when I think about Peter? Or when I think about… anything like that?”
“Ezra is will have to explain all that,” Mae said suddenly.
Jack had looked as if he was about to say something, but she cut him off. I thought about continuing that line of questioning more, but there was still so much about them that I wanted to know.
“So how do you turn into a vampire then?” I returned back to the topic we’d been on before I’d distracted them with my
beating heart and pheromones.
“I drank Peter’s blood. So it’s Peter’s blood, and Ezra’s blood, mixed with my blood coursing through my veins.” Jack gestured to his arms, as if I could see through his skin to his veins. “It’s not like a father-son thing, because it’s not part of who they are. It is who they are. My blood is their blood.”
“Does that actually have any bearing on who you are?” I leaned on the island, looking intently at him. I was starting to give myself to their fantasy completely, and I was interested in them as if I actually believed.
“They don’t define my personality. We’re three distinct individuals, as you can tell by spending time with us.” Then Jack looked over at Mae, who nodded at him. “But we… Remember when you first came over to meet them and I said that I knew Peter and Ezra would like you? It was because I liked you.”
“So they’ll like whoever you like?” I was skeptical, because Peter still didn’t like me.
“No, no, that’s not it either.” Jack sighed, and he debated how much he was going to tell me. I didn’t understand what he could still possibly be hiding from since he’d confessed vampirism. “Because I don’t just like you. My blood likes you.”
“Okay, what the hell does that mean?” I actually leaned away from him a little bit, and I’m sure I looked afraid.
“Jack, maybe Ezra would be better suited to talk about that,” Mae gave him an even glare, and he lowered his eyes. Then she turned back to me, smiling warmly. “Ezra really is a bit of an expert on everything. Jack and I still have so much left to learn.”
“You guys aren’t really vampires, are you?” I asked apprehensively, and Mae laughed.
“Oh, love, I’m sorry, but we are.” She tucked a strand of hair back behind my ear, and since I didn’t push her away or flinch, she smiled.
“But you guys don’t sleep in coffins or have fangs and you’re not pale.” I said, then quickly corrected myself. “Well, except for Mae, but even she’s not that pale.”
“We kind of have fangs.” Jack opened his mouth wide and ran his tongue along his teeth, emphasizing the pointed incisors. They weren’t longer or bigger than any other teeth I had seen, but they did look awfully sharp.
“And coffins are just a ridiculous legend. Beds are much more comfortable.” Mae scoffed at the notion.
“But you’re tan. You can’t go in the sun! Wait, can you go in the sun?”
“We can, in fact, but we don’t usually,” Jack continued. “The sun kind of makes us tired. But we won’t burst into flames or die or anything like that.”
“That doesn’t explain the tan,” I pointed out.
“We don’t change from when we were turned, and I didn’t live only indoors before. In fact, I skateboarded a lot so I was out in the sun. When I turned, my skin was full of melanin, and now it always will be.” Jack thought about it for a moment, then corrected himself. “We do change a bit. We improve. I wasn’t quite this handsome, and I had more of a farmer’s tan. But somehow, it evens things and smoothes everything, like gleaning off any fat I had. It’s impossible for a vampire to be fat. We no longer require the storage of anything, so it all dissolves pretty quickly after the turn, except for what we need to look human, like Mae’s breasts.”
“Thanks,” Mae rolled her eyes at him. “And actually, vampires tend to be less pale than most people because our blood isn’t blue.”
“What do you mean?” I furrowed my brow, trying to understand if she was making some kind of aristocratic reference.
“Blood is blue until oxygen hits it.” Mae took my wrist and turned it up, so I could the blue veins coursing underneath my skin. Then she held up hers next to it, and sure enough, the same veins in her arm looked almost deep purple through her pale skin. “We drink our blood, so it’s already been oxygenated.”
“You drink blood.” Until then, I had been trying hard not to really think of it. When I thought of Peter biting me, it had more been about the feeling of everything, and not about the actual act of him drinking my blood. It was almost impossible to imagine Mae or Jack drinking anyone’s blood. Mae was still holding my wrist, running her fingers affectionately on my skin.
“It is a necessity,” Mae whispered sadly.
“But like animal blood, right?” I asked hopefully, but Mae kept her eyes on my wrist, so I looked up over at Jack, who just shook his head.
“We can’t live on animal blood.” Jack kept his pale blue eyes on me, so I had to focus not to look even mildly revolted. “It’s the same reason a person can’t live on a blood transfusion from a dog or rat. What we essentially do is require a weekly blood transfusion to survive. We just have to ingest it.”
“You… you kill people?” I know my voice was trembling, but then Mae’s eyes shot up and both her and Jack looked appalled.
“No! No of course not!” Mae vehemently denied it. “People can lose huge amounts of blood before they die.”
“We just drink blood from people,” Jack elaborated. “It’s essentially a painless process. Our saliva works as like an anesthetic and it makes the wound heal crazy fast.”
“And Ezra’s so good at it that most people don’t even know they’ve been bitten,” Mae explained, somewhat proudly. “Me and Jack aren’t that good. But we live mostly on blood from the blood bank anyway. It’s not quite as good, but its much less complicated.”
“You get blood from the Red Cross?” I pictured Mae and Jack going down to a Red Cross and asking for a pint of blood for the ride home.
“No, not exactly.” Mae let go of my wrist, gently touching my knee as she did, and then smiled at me. “There’s a vampire blood bank. People think they’re donating to some place like the Red Cross, but it’s for us. So we have a fridge in the basement full of blood.”
“Not that Peter or Ezra ever really get into it,” Jack muttered, and Mae shot a look at him.
“They lived too long in the times before blood banks,” Mae said, looking rather apologetic. “They’re purists.”
“So… they… what? How does that work? They just find some random person and bite them?” The thought of Peter biting anyone else made me feel vaguely nauseous.
“No, they have clubs where people willingly donate, and a lot of times, they can pick up girls, who think they’re going on a date and getting a long kiss on the neck, but really they’re just getting a snack,” Mae clarified.
“You’re okay with that?” I asked Mae. Ezra was her husband. It would have to be painful knowing he was biting other people. “Ezra’s out and about dating and drinking other women?”
“It’s not pleasant,” Mae admitted, with a pained expression. “But it’s the nature of who we are. And I’d rather have him seducing a woman than just attacking someone and killing them. It’s the price of eternity, love. I can be with the man I love forever, but he has to kiss other women.” She smiled sadly at me, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to come to terms with it like she had.
“I drink almost entirely bag blood,” Jack interjected brightly, and I turned my attention back to him.
“The night you picked me up, were you going to bite me?” Then, remembering how suddenly drowsy I was and that I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten home, my eyes widened. “Did you bite me?”
“No!” Jack put his hands up defensively under the scrutinizing glares from Mae and me. “No! I didn’t! Honest!” Then he looked sheepish. “I’d actually just come from the club, and I’d … fed, right before I saw you.”
“You mean the clubs I was trying to get into?” I wondered if Jane had ever been picked up by a vampire without knowing it. She probably had, and that served her right.
“No, it’s a vampire one. Well, I guess I don’t know where you guys were trying to go, so you might’ve. Most people don’t know it’s a vampire club. In fact, that’s how I turned.”
“Peter picked you up at a club?” I raised my eyebrow skeptically.
“Nope,” Jack grinned. “I followed these two hot chicks in, and t
hey turned out to be psychotic vampires. Peter was there, looking for something to eat, but he wasn’t paying any attention to me cause I’m a guy, and it’s harder to feed off somebody that isn’t attracted to you. But the girls went crazy and left me for dead. People can lose a lot of blood, but not all of it. Peter found me in the alley behind the club, and for some reason, he took pity on me. He took me back here, and I’ve been here ever since.”
“Do you have to be dead to turn?” I asked.
“No, you can’t be dead,” Jack clarified. “Once you’re dead, you’re dead.
That’s it. Vampires aren’t undead. We’re just a different form of people. Ezra explained it to me that vampirism is a virus, sorta like AIDS, except whereas AIDS makes you sick, this makes you better.”
“It’s a virus?” I looked skeptical.
“I guess.” Jack shrugged. “That’s what Ezra told me. It’s like an evolutionary mutation. As far as Ezra can tell, the oldest known case of vampires only dates back about 1000 years ago, the first time the population reached 300 million. Naturally, as the population grew, so did the amount of vampires. But his theory is that people have no predators. The only thing that really takes people down is weather and disease. The plagues actually helped keep the population in check. When cities were overflowing, a plague would come and knock the numbers down. A vampire is just another kind of plague.”
“Yeah, that’s great and everything, but a virus?” I shook my head in disbelief. “How can a virus do this to you?”
“Again, Ezra is more of an expert than I am,” Jack began. “But it just makes you more efficient. We get exactly what we need all the time. We don’t have to process anything. We live on pure, fresh nutrients. I think it actually kills a lot of the organs in our body, because so much of the human body is spent digesting and utilizing food. We don’t do that. It’s just there already. And it stops decay. When we die, we’re like Styrofoam. We’re here forever. When we get injured, we heal at an alarming rate, because we’re all blood. Blood, skin, muscle, and bones that are stronger than metal.”
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