by Aya DeAniege
“Of all the stupid things you’ve believed,” he roared.
Helen went bright red as Harry joined Peter in his laughter.
“They aren’t real, Helen!” Harry roared.
They laughed as her parents frowned. It wasn’t the confused sort of frown, but the disappointed look parents got when their children had fallen into a clear trap.
Called it, douchebags. We can still eat douchebags, right?
No, no one could eat anyone.
“She’s not joking,” I said.
Which only made them roar louder.
The cups on the table rattled as Helen’s head lowered.
I’m not doing that.
I gritted my teeth and forced the cups, then the table and even the furniture to stay in place as my little darling fought with herself for control. She gasped in a little breath, and everything went still. No more resistance from the furniture, no more laughter from her brothers.
“Now you’re crying about it?” Zane demanded.
“Sweetie, it’s just a big conspiracy by the government to turn people away from God,” Lea said. “You’ve just got to accept Jesus into your heart, and you’ll see the truth of the matter.”
I bent and kissed Helen’s temple.
When it came to doubters, there was really only way to prove that I was immortal, and I had no problem doing that to prove them wrong. Since Lu’s death, I had begun to heal at a faster rate, it was a wonderful reaction.
After the kiss, I reached forward and picked a letter opener off the table. I held it up, catching Peter’s eye before I unbuttoned my sleeve. By the time it was unbuttoned, I also had Harry’s attention.
Then I slammed the letter opener into my arm. Lea screamed and ran for the kitchen. Zane glowered at me, saving his judgement for after all was said and done.
Or perhaps that was his judgemental look, how was I to know?
Lea ran back in with a tea towel in her hands as I casually pulled the letter opener out and handed it to her before taking the towel and placing it under my arm to stop any blood from falling on her furniture.
Before her eyes, the wound healed. I wiped away the remains of the blood as Lea fell to her knees, hands clutched in front of her. She began babbling some nonsense that she might have thought came from a bible, but she was quoting it all wrong.
“That’s hardly necessary,” I murmured.
“Trick of the light,” Peter managed to get out.
“That’s the letter opener your grandfather gave me,” Lea protested.
“He’s a magician.”
“Vampire,” I countered. “I turned Helen a week ago.”
“Isn’t that against your laws?” Zane demanded.
“Try asking politely, and stop eyeing my Progeny like a piece of meat,” I barked back at him.
“Wait, wait, wait,” Peter said, raising his hands. “You’re one of them interview vampires, aren’t you? That’s what this all is about, about getting our reaction to a possible vampire on record. Like a, an example to others what coming out is like?”
“An example,” I corrected. “And we are not joking around here. Helen is a vampire. We don’t tell our families, just leave. But in this day and age, that’s not exactly possible, now is it? So instead we agreed to come and do this meeting.”
“You could choose any human in the entire world, and you chose her?” Harry asked.
“Are all the interviewers being turned?” Peter countered.
“No, just her. There were circumstances beyond our control that led to her being turned. Had there been another way, she would still be mortal.”
“For how long?” Zane asked.
“For as long as she lived.”
“You killed my baby,” Lea cried.
I almost sighed, but I tried to put myself in her shoes. The grandchildren she would miss out on, the mother-daughter talks. For her, it probably did feel as if Helen had been ripped from her arms.
Yet the two hadn’t spoken in quite some time.
“As you can see, Lea, your daughter is alive and well. She will not grow old and die.”
“She won’t have a family or children of her own,” Lea protested.
“Not the kinds of children you might have thought she would, no,” I said.
“Get out,” Zane snapped, jabbing a finger at the door.
Helen was up and walking out before I thought to stop her. She had been so unresponsive that I had thought she had withdrawn into herself.
I stood and straightened my clothing.
“No worries, you will still be paid. If you wish to pursue this line of thought, that she is dead, then you may retrieve her possessions from her old roommate. Whatever hasn’t been sold off to pay a supposed debt.”
I walked out of the house and found Helen with her back to the building. I went to her immediately and wrapped my arms around her, holding her close as she wept. Leading her to the car, I opened the door and pushed her inside, then went around to the other side.
As I opened my door, Zane came out of the house. Sighing, I leaned on the roof of the car and watched him approach.
Helen had told me what he would want, but I didn’t expect him to be chomping at the bit so eagerly. Normally those who were as Zane was would cozy their way up, manipulate their way in and then drop their question.
But then, I suppose if Helen knew what her father would ask, he probably wasn’t so great at manipulation. Being good or bad at the skill didn’t stop narcissists from thinking they had perfected it.
“No,” I said.
“I overreacted,” Zane said.
“I think you reacted as a human would react,” I responded with a shrug. “But here’s the thing, Zane. The wellbeing of my child is up to me and only me. There is no one else who will stand for her or protect her except for herself. And from what she’s told me so far, I think she’s done enough of that for eternity. So no. We are not coming back inside.”
“We can start over,” Zane said.
Helen said something from inside the car, and I bent, looking at her.
“Pardon?” I asked.
“He wants you to turn him,” she said, her voice breaking as she began crying again. “He’s sick with something and dying, so he doesn’t have time.”
“What did I tell you about mind reading?” I asked.
There was no tone to my voice, just a simple question asked. Yet the words made her burst into a fresh set of tears, her face screwing up as she went red just trying to breath. She said something, and it took me a moment to figure out what she said through her emotional meltdown.
“I can’t help it around them!”
I straightened and met Zane’s eyes. “Not now, not ever.”
I climbed into the car and immediately drove away. As I pulled away from the curb, Zane approached the car but made no attempt to open the door. Just out of sight of the house, around the corner, I pulled to a stop and put the car into park.
Helen had her elbow on the door, and her head on her hand. There was a resolutely unimpressed look on her face. As I watched her, she sniffed and seemed to come back to herself just a little. Not all the way, but some of it. She stared out the windshield of the car wearily, clearly not interested in doing anything but sit there and stare.
“Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.
“No,” she said with no inflection to her voice. “Talking about it isn’t going to change anything.”
I leaned over and pulled her towards me. Hugging her, I kissed her temple and then moved just far enough away that I could look at her.
“You did something that no other vampire has done.”
“Came out to my parents?” she asked.
“Some have done that, but you didn’t eat them afterward,” I said.
Then was not the time to bring up the items that tried to move. I would have to ask around, but I couldn’t help but wonder if a fledgling who knew they had a power could use it earlier than those who didn’t. Perhap
s it was mind over matter.
I had been afraid of my powers, Helen had yet to experience the terror of such a thing. I hoped she never did.
You can’t protect her forever.
“I wouldn’t want to,” she said with a little sigh.
It was that defeated sort of sound. Like she felt there’d be no point to it because her family would be unimpressed with her trying to eat them even.
“Do you want me to burn the house down?” I asked. “I’m quite adept at arson.”
She smiled and shook her head.
“A little light maiming, maybe. I could make it look like a mugging.”
The smile turned to a little giggle.
“There’s lots of woods around here to hide a body too.”
Helen giggled again.
She thinks you’re joking.
I could work with that, though. I was a little insulted because the last thing I wanted to do right then was joke. There was every reason in the world to go back and exact revenge on her family for the way they had behaved.
Stupid mortals got eaten, plain and simple.
“Maybe?” I asked. “Little light stabbing. That might be fun, don’t you think?”
She batted at my chest gently but was still smiling. So I kissed her temple once more and pulled away.
“Well, that was a bust,” she said.
“If we get really descriptive, I’m sure we could draw it out,” I said. “Talk about the air of the room and the pictures on the walls. Which, wait, I don’t recall any pictures of you or your brothers.”
“My mother remarried, her husband is the one who turned her to Jesus.”
“Amen, Lord,” I said quietly. “What would she think to know that she and I pray to the same God?”
“She’d probably tell you that you prayed to Satan,” Helen grumbled. “No, none of us has been saved, so we don’t have a presence in the house.”
“But every parent keeps something,” I said.
Helen shrugged. “Not mine. That’s not the house I grew up in. I only spent four years in this town, for high school. Before that we lived in a lot of different places. I never really had a lot of anything. I had a picture or two, but everything else was new from the past couple of years.”
“There’s nothing of you anywhere,” I said.
“Nope, not anymore,” she said. “The closest I had to anything were the parks.”
“Parks?” I asked. “Then why move to a city? The nature out here is much more impressive than what the city has.”
“Work, mainly,” she said. “And school, for as long as that lasted. I have a student loan. They’re probably going to want that paid off.”
“I’ll call Kevin,” I said.
“No, I should pay my own debt,” she said.
“If you insist, you can pay me back,” I said. “But by clearing the debt, we clean your slate a little quicker. People forget the ones who pay things off and remember the debtors. We don’t want your image on file somewhere for owing money.”
“Then you probably want to know about the credit card debt too,” she said with a wince.
“Don’t tell me the number, so I don’t have to ask how a woman of you habits managed to rack that up,” I said.
She made a little sound at the back of her throat.
“Is that all? Of the debt, I mean. A student loan and one credit card?”
“It is, need to cancel my phone, though and pay that off.”
“Troy did that the first night,” I said.
“Well, I think that’s the last of me, then,” she grumbled.
“Okay, that’s easy enough. So, we can’t talk to your parents. You never mentioned any friends. Is… is there a park you’d like to go to?”
“There’s an idea,” she said.
As we pulled up to the park, my phone went off. Sighing, I pulled it out and read the text out loud, as I was supposed to.
“We can talk about this, come back. Jesus can save you.”
From my mother, of course, which I suppose meant there was one upside to taking on new identities the next day. She wouldn’t be able to harass me about my sinful ways if she couldn’t get a hold of me. The poor person who inherited my number, though, would have a hard time convincing her that it was no longer my phone.
“By making you mortal again?” Quin asked, then chuckled. “If that worked, I’d be mortal centuries past.”
I shrugged and put the phone on silent. As I did so, a text came from Peter. He and Harry took after my father, except not quite so badly. The only time I heard from either of them was when they wanted something. Money, a place to crash, an old computer they assumed I must have because I’m totally rich or something.
The last time Peter had contacted me, he had wanted to crash in my already cramped apartment. He threw a fit when I said no, because clearly there was no place for him to sleep. Said he was never talking to me again, said a bunch of hurtful stuff I don’t want to get into, and then told our mother that I had been mean to him, so I heard it from her as well.
Suffice to say, I was suspicious right away.
“Can we talk? Mum gave me your number.”
“Which one is that?” Quin asked.
“Peter,” I said with a frown. “He’s the biggest jerk of all of them.”
“People can change,” he said quietly.
“Where are you?” I read out from Peter’s text rather than get into an argument about what I believed my family was capable of.
“Tell him where we are, he can come out, and if he’s nice, I won’t snap his neck.”
“The police are already searching for you,” I protested.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “As of tomorrow morning after the interview, I no longer exist, and Balor will be searching for a new home for the Archives. No one will be finding us again. If I want to kill someone for their sins, I will.”
“It’s not your choice,” I said desperately.
“Helen, if you don’t stand up for yourself and protect yourself, you better believe that I will take matters into my hands and I won’t let something like a little blood stop me from doing so.”
I was guessing that was both command to send the text, and a dare on his part. If Peter did something stupid, either I was to deal with it, or Quin would eat him even if I protested as he did so. I was still learning the subtler commands, how to tell that something was a command and not just a comment. That had gotten me out of a lot of situations, because I hadn’t known that I was expected to do something, but somehow I doubted it would save Peter’s life given the tone of Quin’s voice.
“Fine,” I said, texting Peter the location as I did so. Another text came through. “Balor moved the interview to a secure location, as of dawn the tablet will be blocked from their network.”
“Why dawn?” he asked.
“They can’t just make the interviewers give our location, considering they don’t know where my family lives. They may have claimed not to know what’s going on. Which means the police would need a warrant to obtain the information.”
“They’re stalling?” he asked. “That’s bold for mortals who will face the law. I suppose that also means that the officers who responded to your break in remembered that you were a part of the interview.”
He seemed particularly grumpy about that. Like he had been told that matter had been settled, and it hadn’t been. Vampires were used to lying to one another about all sorts of things, so why not that as well?
I was going to go with: Lucrecia didn’t wipe their memories as well as she claimed she had.
“You really underestimate the term ‘vampire’ and mortals. It was probably the first call for vampire activity in the city, they’re probably using it as a training tool and spreading it all across the country. So, yeah, everyone probably has a picture of my face up on the wall.”
“Little surprised the interviewers are able to resist the police just visiting and making an inquiry.”
“
I’m sure they have a team of lawyers,” I said. “Given the fact that they’re dealing with vampires and all.”
The phone in the car rang, then picked up. Quin made the same face at this call as he had at the previous one. It was almost annoyance mixed with frustration.
“Kevin,” Quin said sternly.
“Mother is a little upset.”
I looked at Quin and saw the eye twitch before he smoothed out his features. Knowing that mother didn’t mean Kevin’s actual mother, I also knew it was code for something. It took me a moment, because I’m not used to talking in code, damn it, but I got the gist and realized that something had gone wrong during the move.
“Talk to me, Kevin.”
“She advises that I don’t,” Kevin responded steadily. “She’s also wondering where you are.”
“Kevin,” Quin said sternly. “What are they trying to hold you on?”
“Interfering with an investigation,” he said steadily.
Quin sighed and set his head on the wheel of the car. For a moment, he sat like that. Forehead pressed against the top of the wheel, hands at ten and two. His eyes closed and he sighed again, seeming to mutter something under his breath. Finally, he sat up and bit his top lip.
“Sir, it’s been three hundred years,” Kevin said. “And they know about the backup.”
What the hell did that mean? Three hundred years must have referred to the last time mortals had come close to Quin, or the last time Mother was used. But the backup? What was the backup? If someone was caught…
Oh, oh, if stock was caught, they’d probably just kill themselves, rather than give over information about their vampire. Unless, of course, they could make it seem like they were crazy. With vampires out in the open, it wasn’t possible to hide their existence any longer, which meant that Kevin couldn’t claim to be insane.
“No, they just do that in general,” Quin said. “I’m going to hire you a lawyer who isn’t a part of the family, understand? I can’t hire family because they might be arrested as well.”
“Do what in general?” I mouthed at Quin.
“Shoelaces,” he mouthed back with a jab towards the floor.
Typical jail safety.
