His face was above me and… I looked up into his eyes, his dark, dreamy eyes and … they flashed red. Red like fire or demon eyes or something else that I couldn’t explain because I had never seen anything like it before. I had started to scream then, and he laughed, showing long, white, sparkling fangs dripping with red blood.
My blood?
I was suddenly jolted out of the memory and reminded that I was still in the shower. The water was starting to run cold over my back and my fingertips were starting to wrinkle.
Getting out of the shower, the earth felt shaky around me, my feet wobbly, my body unsteady.
I must have been drugged. He drugged me and that was why I couldn’t remember it all and that was just a vision; like a fever dream, but it was brought on by all the alcohol and whatever drug he gave me.
That had to be it!
As I wrapped a large, fluffy towel around my naked, wet body, I steadied myself leaning against the counter. Why did it feel so real then? If that was a dream, it was the most realistic dream I’d ever had. Also, how did that explain the holes in my neck?
Wiping the steam from the mirror, I looked again at myself. My face free of last night’s makeup now… my eyes less racoon-like, but still tired… and then I looked again at my neck. With the dried blood washed away, there were two very distinctive little holes in my neck.
Fang marks.
I felt the room spinning and growing dark, and quickly sat down on the toilet before I passed out. The last thing I needed was to be carted off naked in an ambulance after a crazy night of too much drinking and mystery sex with a stranger.
Chapter 3
It didn’t make any sense. There had to be another explanation, even if I couldn’t remember it right now. My hungover mind was just playing tricks on me. Sitting was already making me feel better.
While still sitting on the toilet, I dried my body from the shower and began to slide into my new clothes. I didn’t want to make any sudden moves and black out again, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my day hiding in the bathroom, either.
Once I had dried, dressed, and put some conditioner in my hair, I left the bathroom feeling as pulled together as I was going to be able to manage, for now. I’d just try to avoid my roommates and well… anyone else… for a little while, until I started to feel better.
You can do this, Carmilla. You just need some hydration and a decent meal.
I needed some fresh air, and my stomach was still churning, so I decided to go for a walk. Not usually the fitness or exercise type, this was new and random, but I just had to get out of that house.
My senses were on fire today! Every scent was so strong. All the lights were glaring brighter than ever. My roommates seemed so loud. And that growling in my stomach would not go away. I needed food, but nothing sounded good. I had looked at some fruit in the kitchen on my way out, but the thought of it made my stomach turn.
Now here I was, walking up the sidewalk a few blocks from the house I shared with my roommates, trying simultaneously to forget last night and also to remember what had happened to me in those forgotten, fuzzy moments. I wanted to remember, but I was afraid to remember.
What if I saw his face again, and those eyes, and those bloody fangs?
I was so lost in my thoughts, that I didn’t even notice someone walking very close behind me until the voice said something just inches from my ear.
“You’ve been bitten,” she stated matter-of-factly.
“Excuse me?” I didn’t intend to have quite that level of snark in my voice when I said it, but I was having a day, and it was starting to show. I turned around and came face-to-face with a petite woman with a serious face.
“You were bitten, and you have the gene. The Turn has already started, I bet. You’re becoming a vampire, Carmilla. You can either come with me and learn how to do it correctly, or I have to put you down.”
“Put me… down?“
“I don’t make the rules. I just enforce them. You have 24 hours to decide. We can’t give you a minute longer than that. The Turn will be complete on the 3rd day after you were bitten.”
“Who are you?” I asked. She hardly looked older than me but something about her was different, more mature, as if she had lived a dozen lifetimes to my one. She didn’t look like she wanted to be trifled with, either.
“If you come to the Academy, you will find out. If you choose not to, it’s best you not know.”
With that, she handed me a card and walked away, leaving me standing there on the sidewalk with my mouth hanging open. I looked down at the business card in my hand. It was creamy white, with a red border and the letters MRVA were printed on the one side. This felt like high-quality cardstock here. Nice stuff, not what one would typically use for a prank.
The other side read, “When you decide, dial this number.” Below that, was a telephone number.
Before I could even process what had just happened, I felt those cramps in my stomach again, coming even stronger this time. I was so hungry. Why was I so fucking hungry?
I could eat a horse! Or a dog… like that little yappy dog right across the street being walked by his owner right now.
Mmmm…
Okay, what the hell, Carmilla?
Starting to feel like I was losing it, I stopped in my tracks and turned around. I needed to get home before I passed out here on the street, or worse…
I hardly remembered getting back to the house, but I managed to get inside and to the kitchen in a flash. No one else was around and I needed something to eat. I needed to eat NOW!
Pulling open the door to the fridge, I saw a package of ground hamburger inside. Missy had picked it up for Taco Tuesday this week. It was one of her specials. We all took turns cooking for one another in the house. Suddenly, I couldn’t take my mind off the meat.
I needed it.
I wanted it.
I had to have it.
My hands flew into the fridge like they had a mind of their own, grabbing the package of meat and pulling the wrapper off. Then, I began shoving the raw, bloody meat into my mouth without thinking about what I was doing.
Mmmm.
Before I knew it, the entire package was gone. The cramping in my stomach had stopped… for the moment. But I sat here in the middle of the kitchen floor, refrigerator door still open, fingers bloody from the meat, and was both horrified and confused by what I had done.
I had to move fast before one of my roommates saw me like this. Quickly, I hid the evidence in the trash, washed my hands in the kitchen sink, took a drink of water, but I could still taste the blood in my mouth… it sounded disgusting, but it tasted so very, very good.
What is happening to me?
Now, I ran back to my bedroom where I kicked off my shoes and threw my body down on the bed, closing my eyes and trying to envision this was all a big, stupid dream and I was going to wake up any moment now.
Tears welled up in my eyes but didn’t spill over. I could feel them there, right on the edge, just as I felt right now, as if I were teetering on the edge of something very dangerous but very exciting. At any moment, I could fall right into the unknown. All it would take is a little push, a strong wind…
Something was seriously wrong with me! My heart was thump-thudding in my chest so loud, it sounded like it would explode. I could hear the drip-drop from the kitchen faucet that wasn’t turned off completely. The light was killing me! I had already turned off the overhead light but the sunlight spilling through my curtains was making me feel nauseous. I just wanted it to stop!
I reached my hand up to my neck again. There on the wound, right where those two little holes sat in my flesh, I felt a thumping, heated sensation unlike anything I had ever felt before.
Then I felt him. He was inside me, and not between my legs. His teeth were inside me… his fangs. The fuzzy memories started to come back to me. The mysterious Mr. Knight had bitten me in the neck. He had drunk from me as I writhed and moaned with pleasure beneath him.
I had loved every second of the pure ecstasy of it, and then I had forgotten it.
Now, I couldn’t deny the truth. With the memories returning, even if a bit hazy, I knew what the mysterious stranger on the street was talking about. As much as I wanted to pretend it wasn’t true, my date last night had been a vampire, and now I was, too.
The Turn happened quickly; this I knew to be fact. They’d made us learn about it in history class, although they glossed over the mass genocide part. They wanted us to fear the vampires so that we never tried to activate the gene hidden inside many of us.
Shit.
This was worse than any STD. Why couldn’t he have had chlamydia instead?
I reached across my bed for that card the woman on the street had given me that I tossed on there when I came in. Struggling to hold my phone steady in my hand, I dialed the number.
A male voice said, “Hello, Carmilla.”
Before I could think twice about what I was doing, I shouted into the phone, “I’m in! Please help me.”
Chapter 4
So here we are - cat’s outta the bag. I got bitten by a vampire, and that activated my recessive vamp gene, so now, I’m turning into a vampire, too. Suffice to say, it’s not pretty. It hurts like hell and I get mad cravings and want to rip out the throats of completely innocent people nearby.
The mood swings are worse than anything I have ever experienced, even through puberty and PMS. All of my senses were so heightened, it was positively painful just sitting in my own house. Forget about going into public.
When I wasn’t a big bundle of nerves from all the sights and sounds, I was fighting off the urge to attack someone and sink my teeth into their neck. The hunger for blood was insatiable, uncontrollable, and undeniable. I can see why they say only about 30% of people survive The Turn anyway. It’s enough to drive anyone mad.
And that’s why they’re sending me to vampire school.
Supposedly, this special school was going to teach me how to survive The Turn and be a good little vampire member of society. Killing humans was frowned upon, so they’d teach me how to get my fill to sate the hunger, without breaking any human laws.
But my human life I had before? Well, I could pretty much kiss that goodbye, because nothing was ever going to be the same for me – not ever again. Hera made that very clear when she brought me here. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves…
Sure, I called the number on that card, because I was scared and desperate. But I didn’t know when I did it that they were going to make me go back to school. This was definitely not my thing.
Yeah, I barely passed school the first time around. It was boring and repetitive, and the other kids were mostly all idiots or jerks. I spent four years of high school being the “weird girl”. I blossomed after graduation and since then, I had been living my best life. But school was not my best of times. I did not need a repeat.
But it was either attend Vampire Academy and learn the “ways of the modern vampire” or get put down. Yeah, that’s for real. Hera had meant exactly what she said to me that day on the street.
They were just going to put me down like some rabid racoon. As much as I didn’t want to go back to school at 21 years old, I also didn’t want to die, so I suppose it was a choice of the worst of two evils.
Today, school won.
One Friday night party, drunken one-night stand and I found myself sitting on the floor of my kitchen eating raw hamburger out of the package like a starving animal.
And that’s how I found myself standing before the giant wrought-iron gates of Mystic River Vampire Academy, the greatest hidden gem of Mystic, Connecticut. I promise you; this sleepy little historic town had no idea what was really going on behind those gates. I had lived here all my life and I never had a clue.
It’s crazy the things you can miss when you don’t know what to look for. Vampires had been here in my hometown for my entire life, and I never even knew. Not only that, but they had been training vampires here in my hometown and I was none the wiser.
I had no idea how many secrets were about to be unveiled to me now that I was going through The Turn. It all began when I called the number on that card. The unknown male voice answered and told me to pack and small bag and be ready.
Thirty minutes later, Hera came back for me. I’d babbled something about needing to tell my roommates how long I’d be gone, but Hera had shushed me.
“Let’s see if you even survive The Turn first before you worry about all that,” she had said.
I wanted to argue with her but for one, I didn’t have the energy, and for two, she didn’t look like the type of woman you argued with. She may have been small, but she was scary.
That was when Hera brought me to Vampire Academy, and can you imagine my shock that we didn’t even have to travel very far? Right here in Mystic, just along the famous Mystic River, there was a mansion on a hill, overlooking the water that housed vampires in training.
Boats came in and out all hours of the day and night, with no idea that right there in that old historic building behind the antique iron gates were blood-sucking, immortal beasts just itching for the opportunity to feed.
Well, the object of the school was to teach us not to feed on unsuspecting humans. This was just one of many things I would learn here that would surprise me. As I said, I never liked school before.
But there were some important things to know about vampire school. First, it was not like any school you’ve ever heard of. We were not here to learn about history or arithmetic. In fact, this wasn’t really about school at all.
Instead, this was a special, secret institution meant to teach us how to behave as vampires in the human world so that we could avoid being hunted down and killed, like what had happened in the past to our ancestors. I guess that made them my ancestors, which was a very wild concept for me.
The thing about Vampire Academy was, if you didn’t pass, you didn’t survive. See, the vampire population had nearly been wiped out in the War of ‘25. The military had rounded up all the vampires in reinforced steel cages and taken them to some unknown site to be “eradicated”. If they even suspected you might be a vampire, you were taken in.
It was like the days of the Salem Witch Trials, but you know, with vamps.
It was a nasty time in human history with debates over human rights, social civics and law of the land. Once the truth got out that vampires walked the earth, there were those who would stop at nothing to ensure they were completely destroyed.
There will always be people who fear what they don’t understand. The real problem is that all too often, those are the people who are in charge of the rules. And that is how it came to be that all of the known vampires (or anyone who was thought to be a vampire) was rounded up, taken to the equivalent of concentration camps, and eventually killed, but not before they studied them, tortured them, and treated them like lab rats to try to understand how they worked.
Most importantly, they wanted to gain their secrets to immortality. Many vampires were abused in this way, and thousands more were murdered, all in the name of “safety” for humanity, but we know it was never really about that, was it?
A few got away, of course, stayed hidden, pretended to be normal humans. Forced underground, they learned to lay low, not let on to anyone who and what they were, and because of this, they were able to survive. This is how the Vampire Academy was founded.
They realized they needed a place to bring the vampires together and teach them how to avoid outing themselves or getting caught in a society that wanted to destroy them. 1v1, a vampire would always win against a human. We were stronger, smarter, faster, more resistant, and pretty much superior in every way.
The problem is it would never be a 1v1 fight. With the government itself out to get vampires, there was an entire system built on speciesism, looking to remove vampires from the scene completely. The entire system was rigged against the vampire race. It was never going to be a fair fight.
B
ut what they did not know back then is the gene didn’t die out. It could lie dormant in the blood of some descendants, until something happened to reactivate it. That “something” could be a bite from an active vampire.
This was discovered some time later when newly turned vampires were showing up, or the corpses of those who didn’t survive The Turn were found in their homes, and even in the middle of the streets. At first, they thought they were just hidden vamps who had managed not to get caught in the first Purge, but the truth was soon discovered.
An estimated 42% of the current world population was believed to have the recessive gene. These humans walked around every day with the vampiric gene inside the, but not activated. That was a scary high number, but the good news is, nothing would happen unless your vamp gene was triggered.
You’d live a normal human life, no thirst for blood and no immortality, and you’d grow old and eventually die, just like everyone else. Carpe diem and from dust to dust, and all that jazz.
But if you were bitten by a vampire… well, that was all that was needed to activate your vamp gene and you’d begin The Turn. Turning was unpleasant, painful as hell, and kind of gross, but if you survived it, you officially became a vampire.
And with it, you gained all the perks of being a vampire, the top of which was immortality.
I guess that was one bright side of what had happened to me – I was Forever 21.
Chapter 5
A vampire didn’t age past the age they were when they turned. So here I was, in the prime of my life, young and sexy at 21, and I was going to stay this way forever. BAM! That’s a win, baby.
I mean, part of me was horrified that this had happened, but sometimes you have to make the best of what you’ve been given. No crying over spilled milk and all that.
Apart from my roommates, I didn’t have much of a past human life to worry about leaving behind anyway. And the never-aging perk alone seemed like a benefit.
Bloodlust: Mystic River Vampire Academy (Year Two) Page 2
