Bloodlust: Mystic River Vampire Academy (Year Two)

by Annalise Clark

  “You have no idea!” Then, he put down his cup and started to explain to me how he had spent the past five years, since he graduated from the Vampire Academy, tracking these hunters.

  “We thought they worked for the government,” he explained, “but it’s worse than that.”

  “What’s worse than working for the government?”

  “It’s worse for us, Carmilla.” He didn’t seem to have patience for my jokes. “These guys are like hired hitman. Paid assassins. They get a target from the government and do the hit, take their cash, and then disappear into the sunset.”

  “Oooh.”

  “Yeah, the government will never claim any association with them, and they are never punished for the illegal acts they commit.”

  “That’s awful. So, what were they doing with me?”

  “That’s precisely what I intend to find out, Carmilla. See, there’s a good chance they were in town for a hit and saw you and just couldn’t help themselves. No one could fault them for that.”

  Was I blushing? I actually think this guy was making me blush. Wow…

  “But,” he continued, “Vampire hunters never stray from their mark, which made me very suspicious. If they were here for a hit, they never should have been messing around with you that night.”

  “Right, so you think I may have been the target?” I was truly confused now. “I’m a nobody. I’ve only been Turned for like a couple of months.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he says, looking around and lowering his voice. “See, I think they knew that, too. I think they were looking for a Year One that they could manipulate to help them get inside.”

  “Inside?”

  “Inside the Academy, Carmilla.”

  “Ooooh! So, you think they were using me to get to the real target inside?”

  “Precisely.”

  “But, why me? What makes them think I’d just waltz them right up to the…” I let my voice trail off here, since that was exactly what I was going to do before he followed that night and stopped us.

  Of course, Damien chooses now to laugh. I shot him a hateful look, even though I knew he was right. I deserved this.

  “As for the answer to ‘why you’, that is what I am looking into. As far as I can tell, it’s for no other reason than you were out all the time, drawing a lot of attention to yourself, and you seemed like an easy mark.”

  Great. That’s wonderful. I thought, feeling dirty.

  “You don’t have any vampire family, to you?”

  “What?” I asked surprised. “Hell no. I mean, I don’t think so. If I did, I should know, right?”

  “Not necessarily. You know how secret we have to be about this sort of thing. Still, we find that most families talk.”

  “Yeah… no, I don’t think I have any vampire family. It’d be someone long distance I never knew, if there was.”

  “Well,” he said, “I plan to get to the bottom of this. In the meantime, you need to lay low and don’t go back to that bar.”

  “Wasn’t planning on it, but especially now.” I looked down at my hands, feeling a bit embarrassed and a lot frustrated. “What do you think they gave me that night to make me feel all woozy?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I have a few leads I am following. It had to be some kind of potion. We don’t know of any naturally occurring chemical, or any manmade supplements or drugs that affect vampires. We’ve been essentially immune to any chemical and substance from the human world for as long as we’ve existed.”

  “That’s what I thought… so, what do you mean by potions?”

  “Some magical element to it, for sure. And if they’ve found a way to physically impact vampires, we need to know about it so we can protect ourselves. Everyone could be in danger. What made you dizzy that night could be tweaked to be fatal even. Or maybe it reduces our powers so much that we cannot fight back?”

  “All bad scenarios.”

  “Yep.”

  “So, listen,” Damien said, getting up from the bench. “I’m going to head out to work on this. Gotta see if I can find out who sent those guys, what they wanted from you, and what they might have used to drug you that night. In the meantime, there’s someone back at campus I want you to connect with.”

  “I don’t need a babysitter,” I began, but he cut me off.

  “Not a babysitter, Carmilla. A friend. He’s my brother, Amadeus.”

  Damien had a brother? Oh damn! I wonder if he was just as hot.

  “Your brother Amadeus is a student?”

  “No, actually, he’s staff. And he knows a lot about vampires and a lot about vampire hunters. He’s also very skilled in vampire magic. I’ve filled him in.”

  I winced as he said that.

  “I left out the most embarrassing parts,” he laughed. “Don’t worry. I just told him what he needed to know to help you.”

  “Alright,” I relented. I guess having a more experienced friend at campus wouldn’t be bad for me, especially if he looked anything like his brother.

  “Great, so when you go back today, head downstairs to the basement classrooms and look for his. It’s Room 408 and he has a green dragon on his door. Dude’s gotta thing for dragons…”

  “Hey, no judgement here,” I said, putting my hands up in front of me. “Seriously though, thanks for the help Damien. I know I suck at showing it, but I really do appreciate all you’ve done for me.”

  “No worries,” he smiled, and I felt my stomach doing butterflies like I was 15 again and my crush had just called me cute. Why was I always such a hot mess around this guy? I stood beside him, and said my goodbyes, trying not to be weird or show what I was feeling on the inside.

  “Oh, Carmilla,” he stopped me just as we were parting ways. “There’s one more thing you need to know about my brother.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He reads minds.”

  “He what?”

  “He reads minds. Mastered the art of telepathy. He’s basically a vampire genius. So, you’ll want to block your thoughts unless you want him all up in that pretty little head of yours.” He pointed to his temple, laughed, then did a little wave and turned the other way, walking toward downtown Mystic.

  Chapter 19

  “Oh sure, of course he is.” I just nodded and walked in the opposite direction back to campus. It was time to find this mind-reading Amadeus.

  I found his door by the green dragon, just as Damien had said and when I knocked, a familiar sounding voice replied, “Come in, Carmilla.”

  He sounded like his brother, but the resemblance was small. In the face and eyes, you could easily tell they were related, but Amadeus was smaller in build and stature, thinner, and darker in skin tone.

  He had the same great smile and chiseled face, and he wore a white lab coat and gold-rimmed glasses. Did vampires need glasses?

  ‘No, but they make me look smarter, don’t you think?”

  Oh yeah, he reads minds…

  “So, your brother sent me.”

  “Yes,” he said, putting down something he was working on and turning to me. “I have already started my research, but I would like to sample your blood, with your permission, of course.”

  “My blood?” Did he want to feed on me?

  “Oh heavens, no!” He said after reading my thoughts again. “With this, for testing.” He held up a medical syringe and beamed a huge, handsome smile.

  “Oh yeah, of course.” I suppose I was going to make a fool of myself with both of the brothers now.

  Then he pointed to a chair and told me to sit. “I want to see if there are any trace elements in your blood, of whatever they drugged you with that night.”

  The day was long, and I spent the next five hours or so in the lab with Amadeus. He did my testing, showed me around his lab and taught me some about what he was working on.

  Before long I realized I needed to head back to my room before curfew. But it’s safe to say it was the first time I’d been distracted by a guy since coming here and not
had it be sexual. It was fun and he was a nice guy. I was grateful Damien had sent me to him.

  As I laid my head down on my pillow that night, I hoped that Damien had found those bastards and would make them pay for what they did to me and tried to do to me.

  ***

  The next morning, I was up early and off to classes again. Who would have thought I would actually grow to enjoy school, after being so frustrated with having to come here?

  I suppose I just didn’t know how much I didn’t know.

  What do we really need to learn at Vampire Academy anyway? Couldn’t I figure most of this stuff out on my own? Well, no, actually. As I continued with my classes, I learned a lot more than vampire history and lore. There were things that had never been revealed to the human world before, so this was all new.

  Then, there were all the vampire powers or abilities. A lot of the crap you hear about in popular culture is not real at all, but some of it was. And then there were other things I never would have imagined in a million years.

  Well for one, how to feed. Feeding was always at the top of a new vampire’s questions list. How do we feed? Do we have to drink blood every day? Do we have to kill or eat humans?

  I was relieved when I first learned that we only have to feed on human blood once a month to sustain life. And we didn’t have to hunt. In fact, we were prohibited from hunting or feeding on humans. That was what had gotten us nearly completely eradicated back in the race wars. No, instead, the vampire network had a whole system of blood banks set up.

  You registered with an ID number kind of like a social security number in the human world. All a vampire had to do was visit a blood bank, log in with their number, and you’d be given a feeding. They were in blood bags, like from a human hospital, and no one ever told us where the blood came from.

  I was curious but didn’t dare ask when I was still new. The last thing I wanted to do was draw more attention to myself.

  They were teaching us magic – vampire magic, at least, and I was learning that there was a lot more to this than I had ever realized before. Propanga was so good at telepathic/mind magic. She could make you see anything she wanted you to see. She could cloak like nobody’s business, too. Hell, I bet she could hide an entire submarine under her cloaking magic, if she ever tried.

  She was great at hypnosis, another vampire ability that fell under the mind magic umbrella. I was still working on that one. So far, it had proven successfully in getting free drinks at the bar and seducing hot guys and girls. But if I wanted to live forever undetected as a vampire in the human world, I was going to need to learn to use it for more than that.

  Personally, I was better at the brawn. Strength and speed, as well as changing in size and dimensions to fit through tight spaces. I was also learning to scale walls – like, I was becoming a regular Spiderwoman. And, I was not fully skilled in transformation or shapeshifting yet, but I was very excited about learning how. Not all vampires could turn into every creature, and I hadn’t learned yet what determines that.

  But what I did know was that vampires could transform into a lot more than bats. Many of us could shift to cats, dogs, wolves, butterflies and other insects, mice, locusts, songbirds, birds of prey, and even spiders.

  I was also learning that some vampires could manipulate the weather or have power over the elements, and others could control animals and other creatures.

  We also had several “travel abilities”. In addition to changing shape to fly, some vampires could fly even in their human form. Of course, we were not allowed to go around doing this in front of humans, so it wasn’t something that was practiced all that much out in the open. We also had the power of misting, which allowed us to turn into a mist and move unseen, or into areas we couldn’t otherwise get into.

  Misting was an advanced power that new vampires were not able to do. It took many years of vampire magic and being comfortable in the body to learn to manipulate a once-human body for misting.

  And finally, psychic vampires could drain life force. We were not allowed to use this on humans, and not all vampires could do it. Those who were strong in mind magic, like Propanga, usually ended up being able to drain life.

  All this was exciting and fun to learn about. But it was becoming painfully clear that it was time to stop going it alone. This was an entirely new world, one that I knew very little about, and it was dangerous to think that I could do everything solo and that I didn’t need to learn.

  That was exactly the type of thinking that had led me to where I was the night those vampire hunters almost got me.

  Chapter 20

  That day after classes, I was hanging out in the courtyard of the Academy, chatting with Valerie, a new vampire about my age, who I had most of my classes with. We’d gotten a lot closer since I stopped club-hopping and spent more time around the Academy with my peers.

  While many of the other new vampires were older, Valerie was 23 before her Turn and I think it was helpful to have someone my own age going through this with me. The vampire lust seemed to be hitting Valerie too because she was a massive flirt. Although, I suspected she had been like that before becoming a vampire, too.

  “You will never sate your appetite if you keep playing around with humans,” she purred.

  “What does that even mean?” I asked, frustrated.

  “It means, you need to lie with your own kind, girl. Look, I don’t care what kind of sex you’ve been having before; nothing, I mean nothing, compares to vampire sex.”

  “Is that so?” I asked flirtatiously, not letting on that I had already kind of tried that once.

  “It’s very much so. Once you go vamp, every human is a tramp.”

  “Yeah, no, I don’t think that’s how that saying goes,” I laughed.

  “It is now,” she said, staring deeply into my eyes. She was intense. And hot… was every freaking vampire a sexy supermodel? Damn!

  Little did she know, I’d already been with a vampire, but that was beside the point right now. Maybe I should reconsider my options right here on campus. It seemed like there were more than enough ready and willing partners right here and I wouldn’t even be breaking any rules if I hooked up with them.

  “You know I’m right, girl,” she said with a laugh. “I see you thinking about it. You just hit me up when you’re ready for some of this action.”

  I laughed and promised her she would be the first to know. Maybe this is how I’d get an invite to my first vampire orgy. Even though I knew they really happened, thinking those words felt so weird. Was this going to be my new life now?

  Still, I guess she made a fair point. Besides, if I was going to be made to suffer here, I was at least going to find some good make out buddies while I was at it.

  The last thing I was looking for was a real relationship. If there was anybody I considered that with, Astrid was top of my list. Never mind the fact that I had no reason to believe she’d want that with me. There was just something about her… but she was my friend.

  There were some things more intimate than sex, as I was learning. There were few things on that list, but one of them was true friendship. I don’t think I’d ever had that in my entire life. Who would have thought I would become undead before I ever experienced it?

  No, I didn’t want to do anything to screw that up, even if I did notice the way Astrid looked at me from time to time when she didn’t know I was looking.

  Chapter 21

  As my weeks at Vampire Academy turned to months, I was learning a lot. For example, now I could shapeshift. At least… sort of. One might say I was finding my way with it. I was definitely not a master yet.

  I could turn into bats and birds, but smaller things like insects were still a challenge. It was difficult learning to master the transformation of human form. It seemed like the hardest part was convincing your mind it could actually be done. Even when my instructors showed the class, and I saw it right before my eyes without any smoke and mirrors, it was just hard for my brain
to grasp the fact that it was real, or that I could do the same.

  So, shapeshifting wasn’t an easy thing for a vampire to do. Definitely not as easy as they made it look in a lot of the movies and shows on TV. It could take a lot out of you, especially when you were still learning. Only the strongest vampires could shapeshift successfully, and they were teaching us how to do it safely, but I still found myself struggling sometimes.

  I had also been working hard on my telepathy, which wasn’t as strong as some of my friends, like Propanga or Amadeus, but had come a long way since I first got here. And the related skill of telekinesis, which face it, was just super fun. Who wouldn’t want to move things with their mind if they could?

  Along with all the supernatural powers, I was also learning more about what made us weak. This was key to staying safe in the world of the humans. And I was learning about the underground network that kept us fed, protected, and thriving. I was even learning to control my hunger cravings. As more and more time passed since my Turn, I was able to go longer stretches without feeding. Soon, I’d be on a once-a-month schedule like the rest of the vampires.

  I thought learning to control my hunger for blood would be the hardest part of vampire school, but that was well taking care of itself. We were told we still had to be careful in certain trigger zones – car accidents, hospitals, or other places where someone was bleeding, weakened, or injured. But in time, it got easier and easier to control the urge, even if a human as bleeding out in front of you.

  It turns out, learning to control my lust for sex was ten times harder. Why had this shift turned me into such a horndog? I felt like I had been asking myself this question for months and I was still no further along nor any less horny. It was almost embarrassing at this point.

  “It will taper off in time,” Amadeus said from behind me. Was he reading my mind again? Ugh, I hated it when he did that.

  “If you don’t want me to read it, then you need to learn to block it.”