by Donna Ansari
After that, everything went black.
Chapter Five
I woke up confused, groggy, and feeling like I had gotten run over by a truck. Thankfully, however, I was in my own bed. Standing up shakily, I realized I was still wearing all of my clothing, including the jacket and shoes that I had on the night before. I sat back down again to remove the high-heeled boots, and felt strangely constricted, like my skirt was too tight. Finally, I managed to get everything off and pulled on an oversized shirt I usually wore to sleep in.
Gypsy must have heard me moving around, because she came barreling through the cat door, leapt up onto my bed, and yowled at me.
“Hi, girl.” I reached out to pat her, but was struck by an attack of sneezing, which sent her back out the door as fast as she had come in. I stared after her for a minute, confused. That’s when I also noticed that my surroundings had a fuzzy, almost dream-like appearance to them.
I flung open my bedroom door, and ran down the stairs. No one appeared to be home, so I quickly went through the kitchen and into the backyard, where I stood, shivering a bit in the bright April sunlight.
I held out my arms and looked straight up at the glowing orb that should have been burning me to a crisp, but nothing continued to happen. Eventually, I gave in to my instinct and screamed.
The next thing I knew, David was pulling me back into the house.
“Emma, what the hell are you doing outside, and awake?”
“I don’t know! I just woke up and started sneezing, and now I can’t see and I’m also kind of freezing from being outside in just the t-shirt!”
David grabbed the throw blanket off the sofa and wrapped it around me. Then, quite disturbingly, he smelled me.
“I didn’t get a chance to take a shower yet,” I hastily explained.
“It’s not that. You smell completely human now. I don’t think you’re a vampire at all anymore.”
“How could that be? I mean, obviously, I am glad the sun didn’t burn me up but how did this happen?” I asked. “Also, I can’t remember where I left my glasses six months ago. And I think I need to take an allergy pill.”
Then, another thought occurred to me, and I raced back into the kitchen and threw open the fridge. There was a giant, two-liter bottle of Diet Coke, and it was still half full. I poured a glassful, and took a long sniff. As a vampire, human food had made me vomit, but this smelled as good to me as it used to. After a hesitant sip, I downed the entire glass like it was a shot of vodka.
My previously favorite beverage was as good as I had remembered, and I quickly poured another glass, despite David’s warning of “Careful, you could get sick.”
I took a breath to say, “I have a lot of lost time to make up for.” Then I emptied another glass into my stomach, which hadn’t had any human food in it for a good half year.
Maybe it was the carbonation, but suddenly I didn’t feel so well, and I rushed upstairs to the bathroom. I could hear David laughing behind me.
About an hour later, I once again emerged from my room, this time showered, dressed, and feeling more human. I had to remind myself that feeling more human was an expected thing, since now I actually was human. After my shower, I had found an old box of contact lenses and put in a pair, restoring my vision. I also located an old bottle of allergy pills, which I now had to take in order to breathe around my cat.
By then, it was a little after five in the afternoon, and the sun was still up, so I put on my jacket and again went into the back yard, this time much less dramatically.
There was an old cast-iron table and chair set in the middle of the yard, and I sat down in it, taking in my surroundings. I looked around at the yard and was surprised at how pretty the spring flowers were in the afternoon sunlight.
In the time I had been an obligate creature of the night, I had told myself I didn’t miss things like the sun and being awake during the day, but now I realized that I had been lying to myself. I sighed and leaned back in the chair and let my head fall back so my face was up to the sun. The warm sensation coupled with the not-burning to a crisp sensation was very pleasant.
David must have heard me walk outside, because he soon joined me at the table. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.
“I was thinking about ordering a pizza, since it’s been a long time since I actually ate anything.”
“I wouldn’t say no to pizza, but I was asking in the larger sense. Like what are you going to do with your human life now that you have it back?”
“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “Before I became a vampire I wasn’t really doing much. I worked at the freelance job I have now, but full time. And I was dating a loser. Not much else.”
“Will you go back to working full time?”
“I guess I could. I mean, I might as well,” I said. “But I still don’t know how this happened, or even if I’ll change back again just as suddenly.”
At that moment, the door slammed open and Tammy came out. “You guys would not believe what happened last night....Em! What are you doing? Get inside now!”
“I’m okay,” I told her, holding up a hand. “See? The big ball of fire in the sky doesn’t want to kill me anymore.”
Tammy narrowed her eyes at me and walked in a circle around the table, examining me from every angle. I sat still and submitted to this, feeling slightly uncomfortable.
The door opened again then, and Amy came out. “You’re normal!” she yelled at me.
“Well, relatively speaking,” I agreed.
“When did this happen?” she asked. “You were fine last night! You must be so pissed!”
I frowned. “I don’t know if pissed is quite the right word.”
“How can you not be pissed?” she persisted. “One day you’re an awesome vampire witch, and now it’s all gone. You’re just a plain, boring human.”
“Wait, are you saying my witch potential is gone too?” I asked, looking back and forth from Amy to Tammy. As witches themselves, they could both read auras. And from their confused looks, I could tell that mine showed nothing supernatural in the slightest anymore. “Well, that sucks!”
“What could cause this to happen?” Tammy asked, although it seemed like she was mostly asking herself. “Maybe something magical?”
“Or the opposite of magical,” I added.
“Wait!” she said. “I know something! What I was just coming to tell you guys, in fact. Do you guys know that occult store in the Village, the Magickal Well?”
David and I shook our heads in unison, but Amy said, “Yeah, that’s owned by the coven who host all those open rituals in Washington Square Park. They’re pretty cool.”
“Well, they’re no longer witches,” Tammy said.
“You mean like I’m no longer a witch?” I asked. “What happened to them?”
“They were having their meditation on the waxing moon at midnight, and that was the last thing they all remember.”
Something occurred to me, and I asked, “Where did you say they were?”
“They were meeting in the back room of the shop. It’s in the East Village.”
“That’s where I was last night, too!” I said.
“Oh, interesting!” Tammy tapped her chin with her fingernail. “Maybe it’s some kind of area effect?”
“I guess,” I said. Knowing less about witchcraft than my best friend, I didn’t feel that qualified to answer.
“What happened before you lost all your specialness?” Amy asked. “Weren’t you at a vampire club?”
“Yeah, but everything is really fuzzy.”
“What do you remember?” Tammy asked.
“Well, I took the train to 2nd Avenue, and walked to the club from there. I stopped at a bar to eat, because I wasn’t sure of the protocol in the club.”
“You stopped to eat?” Tammy looked confused. “Oh, ewww, I get it. So what happened at the club?”
“Well,” I began, wondering how much to edit out. “There were a lot of vampire
s at the club, maybe one for every twenty humans. I talked for a few minutes with Alex and Michael, and then I just danced for a while.”
Tammy looked skeptical. “You just danced for a while, and then you came home?”
“Well, no. I mean, yes. I guess everything was really fuzzy, so it’s hard to say exactly what happened.”
“Why would everything get fuzzy?” Tammy asked. “From a spell?”
“No,” I said somewhat sheepishly. “Probably because I had too much blood.”
“How could you have too much blood?” she asked. Tammy grabbed my hand and examined the spell ring she had given me that would shock me if a person I was drinking from was near the point of death. “Did this thing stop working?”
“No, I’m sure it’s still working fine,” I said. “I mean I drank a little blood from a bunch of people.”
Tammy crossed her arms and looked down at me. “Why don’t you just tell me everything that you remember? Who were these people that you were drinking from?”
“Just people who were at the club. It was a vampire party, and from what I could tell, we were allowed to drink from anyone.”
“But I thought you had already had blood? So what’s the point of doing that?”
“It’s just, you know, yummy.” I shrugged.
“Are you kidding me?” Tammy asked. “You just go around indiscriminately biting people and sucking their blood?”
“Well, it is kind of a vampire thing,” I said. “But for now I think I would prefer pizza.”
“On it,” David said, taking out his phone.
“So is there anything else that you can remember?” Tammy asked me.
I shook my head slowly. “No, that’s where it gets really confusing, and the next thing I knew, I woke up here.”
Tammy started walking back into the house, and we all followed. “After we eat, I was thinking of going to the Magickal Well to talk to those guys. You should come with me, Em.”
“You mean you want to investigate this?” I asked. “I’m not sure we can do anything about it, but sure, I’ll come with you.”
“Amy? What about you?”
“What about me, what?” Amy asked, taking a can of regular Coke out of the fridge. I noticed that throughout all of Tammy’s questioning, the teen had been very quiet, especially for her.
“Don’t you want to come with us to talk to that coven?”
“No, thanks.” She opened the can and took a long drink. “I have a calculus test tomorrow, so I’ll leave the Scooby Doo work to you guys.”
Chapter Six
After ingesting an almost inhuman amount of pizza, Tammy and I were ready to leave for the store. Or at least I thought we were ready.
“I’m only telling you this because we’re best friends,” she said, “But you kind of look like crap.”
“Thanks,” I said, frowning and reaching for my jacket.
“No, I mean your hair is sort of frizzy and your skin looks a bit sallow. Are you feeling okay?”
“Not really. Up until a few hours ago, I was a supernatural creature of the night, incapable of aging, breaking out, and having allergies. Plus I had flawless skin. I would say I’m actually feeling kind of awful right now.”
“Sorry,” she said, grabbing her purse. “Maybe you should start wearing make-up.”
While walking to the train, I felt myself start to breathe heavily in an attempt to keep up with Tammy’s quick pace.
“Somehow, I am in worse shape now than when I became a vampire,” I complained.
“Well, it’s like you were dead for the past six months,” Tammy said. “All your muscles are atrophied and weak.”
“Right,” I said, pausing to catch my breath. When I looked around, I realized we were in front of the Starbucks. “I think I could actually use a coffee.”
Finally, we were caffeinated and on the train to Manhattan.
“Other than the things that suck, how do you feel about being human again?” Tammy asked.
“I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet.” When I had been human, I had both a job and boyfriend that were going nowhere. Now I only had a freelance job, and as for a boyfriend....
“What am I going to do about Alex?” I spouted out.
“That’s a good question. Do vampires and humans ever date?”
I gave her a pathetic look. “Do you mean like Ethan and I are dating? Yes. Or do you mean like a normal relationship with possible cohabitation and marriage in the future? No.”
“So what are you going to tell him?”
I was torn between not wanting to think about it and really not wanting to think about it. “Maybe I can just avoid that talk for the next fifty or so years, and then I’ll be old and withered and it will be obvious I’m no longer a vampire, and he’ll still be incredibly hot.”
Tammy rolled her eyes at me. “If you’re so miserable being human, just ask him to turn you into a vampire again.”
It was a fairly obvious suggestion, but it still took me by surprise.
The look of shock must have been obvious on my face, because Tammy said, “He would do it, wouldn’t he? Especially if it meant you guys could be together?”
“I guess,” I started. “It’s just that when I became a vampire, it wasn’t by choice. I woke up a vampire with no idea of what I was or what had happened to me. Kind of like now, when you think about it. But now I have a choice of becoming a vampire or not, so I don’t want to rush into anything.” I sighed, staring into my almost-empty coffee cup to deliberately avoid looking at Tammy. “Besides, if I went into it like that, it would seem an awful like I was just doing it for a guy.”
“Maybe, but if you were happier, it’s always an option, right? I mean, I was under the impression that you guys were fairly serious. Am I wrong?”
“I don’t know. I mean, it’s complicated.”
“Why is it complicated?”
“The whole nature of vampires being in relationships is weird, I guess.” I tried to take a sip of coffee, only to find an empty cup.
“It’s like, with humans, you might get married and hope to live together for thirty or forty years. You go through various life changes together. You may buy a house, have children, watch them grow up, retire, and grow old together. With vampires, none of that is going to happen, expect maybe the purchasing of property. And it’s hard enough to stay with someone that long as a human, but vampires can stay alive indefinitely, so imagine trying to be together for hundreds of years. It must get, well, old. Plus there is the whole blood doll thing, so that complicates everything even more.”
Tammy looked concerned. “I’ve never heard you talk this much about being a vampire. So what’s the deal with the blood dolls? How do they make it worse?”
“The sucking of blood is very addictive for humans, and they are completely obsessed with the vampire, and even imagine they are in love with them. I think I might have mentioned that before. Anyway, it’s hard to be in a relationship with someone when they have a bunch of other women always hanging around them acting like they are with the person.”
She frowned at me. “And this is what Ethan was to you?”
I nodded, miserably.
“And this was all he was to you?”
I was silent for a few moments, trying to come up with something, but in the end I had to admit the truth. “Yes, he was just a blood doll.”
Tammy covered her eyes with her hand. “That’s disgusting. But he got away, right? He’s no longer under your thrall or whatever anymore, right?”
“No, he’s not under my thrall anymore,” I said carefully.
“What, you mean he’s under someone else’s then?”
“Yeah, I think. I just found out about it the other day.”
“But that’s horrible. At least you didn’t treat him like total crap. We have to find out who this hussy is and help him.”
“There’s not too much I can do about it now. Plus, it’s not a woman.”
“It’s a guy vampi
re?” she asked. “What does that mean?”
I shook my head. “I don’t think it means anything besides the fact that the mind control is strong enough to overcome any personal preferences.”
“Poor Ethan,” Tammy said. “So the only way for vampires to survive is to have a bunch of people who think they are in love with them and want their blood sucked?”
“Well, it’s not the only way. But to find someone new to feed off of every night is tiring and hard to sustain long-term.”
“Our stop is next, so let’s put this convo at least on a temporary hiatus, especially since it’s not of immediate concern to you anymore.”
I stood up and followed her to the door, happy to put both our discussion, if not my own thoughts, on temporary to permanent hiatus.
We emerged from the subway station at the same stop I had been at the previous night. By then, the sun had set, and I looked down at my phone, which was buzzing with a new text message.
Can I come over? It was from Alex.
Tammy noticed my look of distress and said, “Don’t answer him.”
“If I don’t he’ll just show up uninvited anyway.”
I wrote back with the truth. Not tonight—I’m out with Tammy.
The Magickal Well was close to the subway station. In fact, I realized that I had passed it the night before on my way to the club. It was the first floor in what looked like an apartment building, and you had to go down three steps to get to the front door.
We walked down to find a “Closed” sign hanging in the window, which was somewhat tastefully decorated for a pagan shop. Only one pentagram, albeit a rather large one, hung in the shop window. Various colored crystals and herbs, and one very large black cat, completed the look.
Tammy ignored both the sign and the fact that there were no lights on, and began pounding on the door. The cat stood up and hissed at us, but Tammy continued knocking until we saw a door to some back room fling open.
An annoyed looking woman eventually emerged and mouthed the word “Closed” to us, while pointing at the sign.
Tammy made some odd motions in the air, and while the woman continued to look annoyed, she did come over and start unlocking the door.
