by Lola Gabriel
“No,” Rex smiled, “I’m just very old. We all had horses where I came from, when I came from there.”
“Do you think that if you act mental enough, I won’t call the police?” Maddie asked. Rex could no longer tell whether or not she was genuinely freaked out. She seemed calmer and sounded as though she might be playing, but still she was far from belief.
The phone buzzed as it woke up. Maddie had tucked a corner of the blanket in close to her body, so now she could freely use her hands. She picked up the phone. “Well, I’m beyond late for work,” she said. “Shit, it’s a new job.”
Rex had crossed his arms. He was enchanted by her, yes, but even he was getting a little impatient. “Take a self-photo,” he said, “or whatever they are called.”
She shot him a look. “If it’ll end this ridiculousness, sure, I’ll take a bloody selfie, but I don’t know why I’m still here. This is creepy, you know that, don’t you? Whether you slipped me something or not, this is…” she paused to snap the picture, “this is super weird. And it’s going to take me a while to process but—” She had turned her phone to look at the image on it, the image of her blue-eyed beauty. Cornflower eyes. She remained silent as she took another photo, and another, and another.
“How did you…” she rubbed her eyes and tried again. Then she started to breathe heavily. She ran into the bedroom, where light was still seeping in a little, and ended up on the floor, skirt and top in her hands, crawling, and crying.
Rex ran after her, letting a little of his supernatural speed creep into his movements. Again, he scooped her up, deposited her in the living room. Closed the door to the bedroom.
He let her sob. Sometimes this was the only way. No one pretended transformation of form was going to be easy, especially these days when death was so sanitized. So locked away. When pain was avoided at all costs. The humans had done a good job insulating themselves, yes, but in doing so, they had become soft. Their skins were like butter, just waiting for one scary, painful thing to scoop them away and expose their quivering innards.
“Put your clothes on,” Rex said. When Maddie didn’t respond, he added, “Put your clothes on now.” She looked up at him, still lying on the floor, but then she sat and pulled on the gold top, sad now in its celebration, in its flattering drapery that had been over-stretched by sweat and spilled drinks.
“The back of your shirt,” Rex said, “the neck, what is it covered in?”
Maddie had to pull the shirt round to look. “I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t…”
“Smell it.”
She did. And then she looked up at him, her eyes still brimming with tears. “It’s just coffee or…”
“It smells like life, doesn’t it?” Rex asked. He let himself fall into another voice. The voice of a vampire king. An ancient voice, thick with magic and history and tradition. “It smells like power, Maddie. Sustenance.”
Maddie had struggled to her feet and was pulling on her skirt. “You,” she said, “are mental. I was trying to convince myself you weren’t because I fucked you. Because I’m an idiot. I’m such an idiot. I woke up and I thought what have you gone and done this time, Mads, but I hadn’t done a thing. You’re mad! You abducted me and I don’t know what you did to my eyes but—”
While Maddie was talking, Rex moved to the fridge. He pulled out two blood bags, their contents cold and thick and unctuous and so dark they were almost black in the dim room. Black and shining like the skin of a moving snake. “It’s life,” he said, holding one in each hand. “You must be hungry, Maddie, the transformation is hard.”
Maddie gasped. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the bags, from the settling liquid inside them.
“Is it real?” she almost squeaked. “Is that actual blood?”
“You can smell it, Maddie,” Rex said. “You know it’s real.” He was keeping up his character, the one he knew well, the one he sometimes embodied fully, leading meetings of the council in ceremonial robes or overseeing battles. But she was tugging at him. She made him want to drop the blood and put his arms around her. To keep her safe, let her realize in her own time what had happened. She was making him soft.
And she was crying again.
“You smelled it in the bedroom, didn’t you? And you felt your fangs.”
At this, Maddie’s hand went to her mouth. Seeing his opportunity, Rex moved quickly. He took a stride toward her, and at the same time he let himself be drawn in by the blood. He felt his skin tighten. He felt his fangs unsheathe themselves, and he sank them through the medical-grade plastic into the syrupy liquid below.
Just as he had known she would, Maddie did the same. Her cheekbones became more pronounced, and her teeth shone a hard silver. Her fangs ripped into the second bag of blood clumsily, so she splashed half of it on herself and the floor, and though she sucked, she couldn’t get what was in the bottom either. In seconds, Maddie was lapping instead. She licked the inside of the plastic and then the floor, down on her hands and knees, the ends of her hair trailing in it.
And then as quickly as the change had come over her, she was back to her human form. She threw herself backward toward the sofa and leaned there, wearing a terrified expression. She shook her head. One of her hands was still covered in blood.
“I remember,” she whispered.
Carefully, Rex put the cleanly emptied blood bag that he had been feeding on behind him on the brushed steel countertop. He took a step toward his newest pack member.
“Don’t you dare!” Maddie said, standing shakily. “Don’t you fucking dare. I remember! I remember your smell, like a dead thing. I remember your teeth in my neck! Stay away from me!” And with that, she ran, using her supernatural speed for the first time, out the door of the flat and away.
Rex sighed and shook his head. This was going to be difficult. And he cared for her. Inexplicably, suddenly, and completely, Maddie was important to him. So, he was going to keep working until she accepted what had happened. What she was now. And that he hadn’t hurt her. The last thing he ever wanted to do now was hurt her.
Luckily, Maddie didn’t have the key for the lift, so she would be waiting outside the door for him to continue trying.
6
Maddie
She found a set of stairs, admittedly after busting through a locked door. Maddie had never moved this fast, and she barely had time to register how odd the empty stairwell of the tower block was, clean and concrete, bare and maybe never used before.
At the bottom of the steps, there was another locked and chained door. Without thinking about it, Maddie threw herself against it. The chain snapped, slapping her across the back of her neck. It should have hurt. It should have hurt a lot, but Maddie was full of adrenaline…or something.
Outside, though, she remembered how the sunshine had felt. How it had felt both times. She kept to the shadow of the building and its balconies, pushing herself against the cool concrete. The square that the building sat in wasn’t busy, but there were a few people around—an older woman with a shopping bag, who smiled at her, and a few teenagers loitering by the bins. The teenagers looked over at her and then began muttering amongst themselves. At first, she didn’t pay them much attention, but then, to her surprise, Maddie realized she could hear them. They were two hundred meters away, and she could hear every word they said.
“She looks mental.”
“Is that blood?”
“Does anyone even live in that block?”
Maddie wiped the hand that was still sticky with drying, red-brown blood against her skirt. It didn’t help much. She turned toward the tower block and surreptitiously licked it instead. Even dried and cold, she had never tasted anything as good as the blood. It was enriching, filling, like a bowl of hot soup on a cold day, and yet there was a sweetness to it as well. It was like eating something you have been craving but unable to find, maybe for years. Like you want pizza, but no one remembers what pizza is, and then you find yourself in a pizza restaurant in Naples s
omehow.
She had to let her teeth retract before she turned back around. When she did, the teens had gone. Were they off to get the police? Their parents? She could smell them still. Like warm, fresh baking. Or, not like that at all, but she felt the same lust for it.
She was never going to forgive Rex for this. Was this the way they always operated? Why hadn’t he just drained her? Did he want a bride? A shiver ran down her spine. She had thought she was in charge earlier, she had wanted to sleep with him. And it had been wonderful, it had. Was that a lie? Had he fooled her? Did he do this sort of thing all the time, enchant young women and then take them home? Kill them? That’s what he had done, killed her, and then brought her back as a monster. And monsters shouldn’t be seen.
There was scrubland behind the buildings of the square. She was going to have to dash through sunlight to get to them, but get to them she would. Maddie arranged her hair to cover the back of her neck and tucked over, trying to hide as much skin as possible. She squeezed her eyes half closed against the wild brightness, and then she went, she ran like she had been running in the tower block, so that the world blurred around her, but still there was the cold acid burn, the beginnings of a bubbling feeling under her hair at the back of her neck.
The scrubby area was big, extending from behind the bin enclosure off into the distance. Eventually, Maddie knew, there was a supermarket carpark and maybe a pub garden?
But she had enough shade. She stood beneath a tree and let the horrible fizz leave her skin. She shook it off, and then she looked back at the tower block. She strained to see the windows on the top floor, imagining she might manage to pick out a white smudge of face if he was looking out for her. To Maddie’s utter shock, though, she could see the material of the blinds. She could see everything. The broken blind in the bedroom—the blind she had broken in her fear earlier, before she had known who she was now—revealed a pair of legs moving quickly. He was getting dressed. He would be after her soon.
Maddie was tired from the sun. It was a vicious thing to her now, a violent force that had the power to infiltrate any safe space. It was as though it was dragging the energy from her. Like it was giving her radiation poisoning. And on top of that, her mind was reeling. She jogged at a usual human speed through the small wood, and noticed for the first time that she had no shoes on. Lifting her feet, she could see that there were twigs and small stones stuck in her feet, but they didn’t hurt. She reached down, balancing on one leg, and pulled out a thorn that was embedded in her heel. No blood, just more of that brown sludge. And then, as soon as it had appeared, the small hole in her skin closed up. It happened right in front of her eyes.
She put her foot down quickly and leaned against a tree. And then she heard a rustling. She felt her ears prick up, like a wild animal’s ears. She couldn’t tell how close the sounds were, because she wasn’t used to these new ears. To these new senses, generally. She’d not asked for them either. Her old ears had been absolutely fine. Yes, she’d spent most of her days wearing a headset answering customer calls about telecoms bills gone wrong, and her right ear had always been sore, but at least her life had been normal. At least she had known who she was.
The rustle came again, and slowly, trying to be quiet, Maddie moved toward it. She bashed into a short bush and swore. Then she looked up and there it was. Or, there something was. A fox. A dead fox, its throat running red, blood matting the fur of its chest.
Maddie put a hand over her mouth. Poor creature. This blood didn’t smell like food, but neither did it smell how she remembered blood smelling.
Behind the dead fox there was a tent, a forest-green thing, small, with its flap open. Inside was a sleeping bag. Maddie would think a homeless person had been staying here, but why would a homeless person rip the throat out of a fox? She was shaking and once again on the verge of crying. All she had done was go for drinks after work and now everything had changed. Despite the obvious danger of someone appearing, Maddie sank down onto the ground of dry leaves and twigs. She let her head sink down into her hands.
“Oh, foxy, I bet you had a life too, didn’t you?”
The dead fox didn’t reply.
A few tears slipped from Maddie’s eyes. She didn’t know whether she was crying for the fox, or herself, or for both, or for everything. She had moved here just months ago, moved across the country, after a terrible breakup. She had a cat she had to get home to feed. She had just been beginning to get on her feet—finally an office job after months of customer service, finally the beginnings of friendships. And now she wasn’t even a person. And someone had hurt an innocent animal!
When Maddie looked up from her pity party, she was shocked to see a young man staring at her. He was standing by the fox.
“Is that your blood?” he asked, pointing to her.
Maddie looked down. “Some of it,” she said. “Why?”
“It’s very distracting,” the young, blond man said. His eyes were a steel blue. A cold blue. “I’m afraid I had to feed on this fox, which was a shame, of course, but now that I can smell the proper blood…” He put a hand over his mouth as his face stretched in the way that was becoming a normal sight for Maddie. This time, though, her heart jumped. Or, turn of phrase, her heart was no longer beating, of course! But it was just a moment. He soon controlled his face.
Maddie was too tired to fight. Too tired to argue, or to work anything out. “What do you want?” she asked. “Why are you living in the woods? Are you his friend?” she nodded back at the tower block.
The blond man shook his head, his face displaying a kind of horror. “Him? I don’t think so,” he said. “He turned you.”
Maddie had to try hard not to remember it again, that sweet death smell. That dirt smell. It was like it was stuck in her nose, like it was here now. “Last night, he attacked me.”
The blond man smiled. He had a high-cheekboned face, looked Scandinavian maybe. His eyes flashed with something she couldn’t read.
“We saw,” the man said. “We saw him taking you to his home.”
“We?” Maddie asked, her skin prickling with the thought of more of these creatures.
He nodded. “I’m Nills,” he said, and he put out a slim, bony hand to shake. His nails were strangely long. They scraped against her palm as she accepted his handshake. “I am a member of, well, you could call us a kind of resistance. To him, of course. To his rules. There are more of us. I came to watch over you last night, after we saw him attack you.”
“Why?”
Nills smiled again. “To protect you, of course. Usually he simply kills his victims, drains them, leaves them as empty husks on a street corner. In fact, I believe the police may be in on it. Of course, we’re looking into that.”
“Oh…” Maddie stepped backwards to lean against a tree trunk. “I… I thought, the bags of blood…”
“Yes, he’s lazy sometimes, of course. He keeps some. Sends his lackies out to collect too. He is their leader, after all. He must have taken a liking to you, turning you. We saw you being carried here to his lair and thought perhaps he was going to make you—”
“His bride?” she said, questioningly, before she could help herself.
Nills nodded. “An old-fashioned way to put it, but something like that. I see you’re too smart for him, though, you got away, all covered in blood and no shoes.”
“You’re the one who said lair,” Maddie rebuffed tiredly. Again she looked down at her dirty bare feet. She could still smell the blood she was covered in.
“Come with me,” Nills said, ignoring her halfhearted attempt to verbally spar. “I’ll take you to our home. We’re the goodies.” He flashed his teeth as though this was a joke. Maybe it was, she could barely tell anymore. “And by that, I mean we don’t kill. Except animals like this dear fox. We believe it’s wrong. Rex up there? Well, he has a disdain for humans. He can’t even stand the smell of them. He’s always talking about it. Their rancid stink. Their sweat and breath and the way they rub themse
lves together in public—” Nills turned his head and spat. The gob hit the dead fox in its eye, and Maddie jumped, but Nills didn’t seem to notice. “You can wash and sleep at least,” Nills said. “Come on, it isn’t far.”
And with that, he turned and began marching through the undergrowth. He was wearing a bright nylon jacket and black jeans. The jacket went swish, swish, swish, swish as he moved, the fabric of its arms rubbing against the fabric of the body. Nills’ arms were long. All of him was long. And even more pale than Rex. “We’ll stay in the shadows,” Nills called, not even turning his head, intent on getting to wherever he was going. “I know the sunshine hurts when you are new. You’re weak from it, aren’t you?”
Maddie stayed where she was. She looked back at the fox, at the spit dripping from its sad, dead eye and into the burnt orange fur of its face. And then she heard a door slam behind her. The door of the tower block? She had to make a decision. Had to trust someone with her life, or at least her next few hours, and she wasn’t going to trust her attacker. This stranger was her only other option, as odd as he may be.
She ran after Nills, crashing through the undergrowth, bouncing off tree trunks. Briefly, he looked behind him. “You’re not graceful,” he said, “that’s strange for one of us. Maybe you’ll learn.”
Maddie had never been anywhere near graceful, but all the same this stung for some reason. “I’m tired,” she said. Nills nodded and kept on marching through the trees until they began to thin out and there were more and more cigarette butts and chip bags under her bare feet. Soon, the pub garden she had half remembered came into view. It was a sunny Friday afternoon, moving toward evening, and there were several people smoking out there and sitting shivering slightly with their pints. Nills barely seemed to care. He skirted a little, and then led her through the shade of a white van parked in the car park. He pointed to the pub. “Your maker likes to hunt here,” he said.
