My Blood Approves

by Amanda Hocking

  “Thanks,” Mae gave him a wry look, then turned back to me. “Well, Peter’s not quite two-hundred. Maybe one-ninety or something like that. And Ezra is… Gosh, it’s so horrible that I don’t know how old my own husband is. Oh! Jack, you remember! We had that big party a few years back when he turned three-hundred? When was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack shrugged. “Like… five years ago? Time’s really hard to keep track of anymore.”

  “You’re telling me that Ezra is over 300 years old?” I asked.

  Ezra, who had to be one of the most perfectly attractive people I’ve ever seen and drove a Lamborghini. He’d been around for over three centuries. I had never felt so small or insignificant in my entire life.

  “Yep. I’m the baby. By a lot.” Jack grinned broadly, and part of that made sense. Ezra and Peter’s eyes looked so much older, and everyone seemed to indulge Jack the same way you would indulge the baby of the family.

  “But you call them your brothers, and they can’t be.” I remembered when I asked Jack about it being a fraternity, and slowly, it dawned on me what I had said that had made him laugh. They’re blood relatives.

  “Not in the human sense, no,” Mae explained. “But as vampires… brothers still isn’t exactly the right word.” She looked back over at Jack. “You understand this better than I do.”

  “It’s hard to explain until it happens to you, or if you don’t know the person that turned you,” Jack took a step towards the island and nodded at Mae. “Ezra turned Peter, and Peter turned me.”

  He laid his hands flat on the countertop and watched me, gauging my response to everything they were telling me.

  “You mean Peter turned you into a vampire?”

  Whenever I said the word vampire, I felt like a complete tool. Like I was in a bad horror movie or I was being Punk’d. It just wasn’t a possibility.

  I was having this conversation because it was like when I had a dream and everyone was made of cotton candy or something. I just kinda went along with it. Once I suspended my belief, I just had to go with the flow and pretend like everything made sense.

  “Yeah.” He nodded.

  “So what does that mean? He bit you?” Just the thought of Peter biting anyone made my heart rate speed up. That’s what he’d been trying to do when I was in his room, and even now, knowing exactly what he meant to do, it somehow made me want him more.

  “No, biting doesn’t do anything,” Jack shook his head, but he raised an eyebrow and gave me an odd look. Then it dawned on me.

  “You can hear my heartbeat,” I said. When we had been in the car, right before the accident, my heart had been racing like mad because I was thinking about Peter, and it had been distracting Jack.

  “And when you…” Jack’s expression changed, and he looked away from me, but I could already feel his desire.

  “You’re thinking of Peter,” Mae caught Jack’s response. My cheeks reddened, because it was so embarrassing that the vampires find out that I have a crush on one of them. That was my big concern right now. “You release a kind of pheromone when you’re… ready. I don’t know how to explain it.”

  “It entices us to bite you,” Jack said bluntly.

  My heart had slowed, but he still looked strained. Meanwhile, Mae didn’t look effected by it at all.

  “So… is it just when I think about Peter? Or when I think about… anything like that?”

  “Ezra is will have to explain all that,” Mae said suddenly. Jack had looked as if he was about to say something, but she cut him off.

  “So how do you turn into a vampire then?” I returned to the topic we’d been on before I’d distracted them with my beating heart.

  “I drank Peter’s blood. So it’s Peter’s blood, and Ezra’s blood, mixed with my blood coursing through my veins.” Jack gestured to his arms, as if I could see through his skin to his veins. “It’s not like a father-son thing, because it’s not part of who they are. It is who they are. My blood is their blood.”

  “Does that actually have any bearing on who you are?” I leaned on the island, looking intently at him. I was starting to give myself to their fantasy completely, and I was interested in them as if I actually believed.

  “They don’t define my personality.” Jack looked over at Mae, who nodded at him. “But we… Remember when you first came over to meet them and I said that I knew Peter and Ezra would like you? It was because I liked you.”

  “So they’ll like whoever you like?” I was skeptical, because Peter still didn’t like me.

  “No, no, that’s not it either.” Jack sighed, and he debated how much he was going to tell me. I didn’t understand what he could still possibly be hiding from since he’d confessed vampirism. “Because I don’t just like you. My blood likes you.”

  “Okay, what the hell does that mean?” I actually leaned away from him a little bit, and I’m sure I looked afraid.

  “Jack, maybe Ezra would be better suited to talk about that,” Mae gave him an even glare, and he lowered his eyes. Then she turned back to me, smiling warmly. “Ezra really is a bit of an expert on everything. Jack and I still have so much left to learn.”

  “You guys aren’t really vampires, are you?” I asked apprehensively, and Mae laughed.

  “Oh, love, I’m sorry, but we are.” She tucked a strand of hair back behind my ear, and since I didn’t push her away or flinch, she smiled.

  “But you guys don’t sleep in coffins or have fangs and you’re not pale.” I said, then quickly corrected myself. “Well, except for Mae, but even she’s not that pale.”

  “We kind of have fangs.” Jack opened his mouth wide and ran his tongue along his teeth, emphasizing the pointed incisors. They weren’t longer or bigger than any other teeth I had seen, but they did look awfully sharp.

  “And coffins are just a ridiculous legend. Beds are much more comfortable.” Mae scoffed at the notion.

  “But you’re tan. You can’t go in the sun! Wait, can you go in the sun?”

  “We can, in fact, but we don’t usually,” Jack continued. “The sun kind of makes us tired, but we won’t burst into flames or die or anything like that.”

  “That doesn’t explain the tan,” I pointed out.

  “We don’t change from when we were turned, and I skateboarded a lot so I was out in the sun. When I turned, my skin was full of melanin, and now it always will be.” Jack thought about it for a moment, then corrected himself. “We do change a bit. We improve. I wasn’t quite this handsome, and I had more of a farmer’s tan. But somehow, it evens things and smoothes everything, like gleaning off any fat I had. It’s impossible for a vampire to be overweight. We no longer require the storage of anything, so it all dissolves pretty quickly after the turn.”

  “We drink our blood, so it’s more fat-free,” Mae added.

  “You drink blood.” Until then, I had been trying hard not to really think of it.

  When I thought of Peter biting me, it had more been about the feeling of everything, and not about the actual act of him drinking my blood. It was almost impossible to imagine Mae or Jack doing it.

  “It is a necessity,” Mae whispered sadly.

  “But like animal blood, right?” I asked hopefully, but Mae kept her eyes down, so I looked up over at Jack, who just shook his head.

  “We can’t live on animal blood.” Jack kept his pale blue eyes on me, so I had to focus not to look even mildly revolted. “It’s the same reason a person can’t live on a blood transfusion from a dog or rat. Essentially, we require a weekly blood transfusion to survive. We just have to ingest it.”

  “You… you kill people?” I know my voice was trembling, but then Mae’s eyes shot up and both her and Jack looked appalled.

  “No! No, of course not!” Mae vehemently denied it. “People can lose huge amounts of blood before they die.”

  “We just drink blood from people,” Jack elaborated. “It’s a painless process. Our saliva works as like an anesthetic and makes the wound heal c
razy fast.”

  “And Ezra’s so good at it that most people don’t even know they’ve been bitten,” Mae explained, somewhat proudly. “Jack and I live mostly on blood from the blood bank anyway. It’s not quite as good, but it’s much less complicated.”

  “You get blood from the Red Cross?” I pictured Mae and Jack going down to a Red Cross and asking for a pint of blood for the ride home.

  “No, not exactly.” Mae gently touched my knee and smiled at me. “There’s a vampire blood bank. People think they’re donating to some place like the Red Cross, but it’s for us. So we have a fridge in the basement full of blood.”

  “Not that Peter or Ezra ever really get into it,” Jack muttered, and Mae shot a look at him.

  “They lived too long in the times before blood banks,” Mae said, looking rather apologetic. “They’re purists.”

  “So… they… what? How does that work? They just find some random person and bite them?” The thought of Peter biting anyone else made me feel vaguely nauseous.

  “No, they have clubs where people willingly donate, and a lot of times, they can pick up girls, who think they’re going on a date and getting a long kiss on the neck, but really they’re just getting a snack,” Mae clarified.

  “You’re okay with that?” I asked Mae. “Ezra’s out and about dating and drinking other women?”

  “It’s not pleasant,” Mae admitted, with a pained expression. “But it’s the nature of who we are. And I’d rather have him seducing a woman than just attacking someone and killing them. It’s the price of eternity, love. I can be with him forever, but he has to kiss other women.” She smiled sadly at me, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to come to terms with it like she had.

  “I drink almost entirely bag blood,” Jack interjected brightly, and I turned my attention back to him.

  “The night you picked me up, were you going to bite me?” Then, remembering how suddenly drowsy I was and that I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten home, my eyes widened. “Did you bite me?”

  “No!” Jack put his hands up defensively under the scrutinizing glares from Mae and me. “No! I didn’t! Honest!” Then he looked sheepish. “I’d actually just come from the club, and I’d … fed, right before I saw you.”

  “You mean the clubs I was trying to get into?” I wondered if Jane had ever been picked up by a vampire without knowing it. She probably had, and that served her right.

  “No, it’s a vampire one. Well, I guess I don’t know where you guys were trying to go, so you might’ve. Most people don’t know it’s a vampire club. That’s how I turned.”

  “Peter picked you up at a club?” I raised my eyebrow skeptically.

  “Nope,” Jack grinned. “I followed these two hot chicks in, and they turned out to be psychotic vampires. Peter was there, looking for something to eat. But the girls went crazy and left me for dead. Peter found me in the alley behind the club, and for some reason, he decided to save me.”

  “Do you have to be dead to turn?” I asked.

  “No, you can’t be dead,” Jack clarified. “Once you’re dead, you’re dead. That’s it. Vampires aren’t undead. We’re just a different form of people. Ezra explained it to me that vampirism is a virus, sorta like AIDS, except whereas AIDS makes you sick, this makes you better.”

  “It’s a virus?” I looked skeptical.

  “I guess.” Jack shrugged. “That’s what Ezra told me. It’s like an evolutionary mutation. His theory is that people have no predators. The only thing that really takes people down is weather and disease. The plagues actually helped keep the population in check. When cities were overflowing, a plague would come and knock the numbers down. A vampire is just another kind of plague.”

  “Yeah, that’s great and everything, but a virus?” I shook my head in disbelief. “How can a virus do this to you?”

  “Again, Ezra is more of an expert than I am,” Jack said. “But it just makes you more efficient. We get exactly what we need all the time. We don’t have to process anything. We live on pure, fresh nutrients. And it stops decay. When we die, we’re like Styrofoam. We’re here forever. When we get injured, we heal at an alarming rate, because we’re all blood.”

  “You guys are really vampires?” They had been explaining stuff to me for a long time, but I still couldn’t wrap my head around it. Jack laughed and leaned on the counter.

  “That was my reaction at first, too,” he grinned.

  “I think that was everyone’s,” Mae agreed.

  “But … this is a normal house. I mean, it’s really nice, but it’s normal. And you guys are just like a family. And you-” I pointed at Jack. “-you sit around playing video games all day. In a house the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota? Come on. Vampires are cooler than that.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Jack laughed loudly.

  “Well, you know what I mean. You guys have eternity, and you spend it like this?”

  “Exactly. We have forever. How would you spend it?” Jack cocked his head at me.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. I had never really thought of it before. Trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my measly little human life had always seemed like enough. “But something more glamorous than this.”

  “Peter and Ezra have seen everything, at least a hundred times, and Mae doesn’t really wanna go anywhere,” Jack shrugged. “I mean, I’ve traveled a little bit, but I’m not in any rush. I’ll be able to see it all one day. I went to the pyramids with Peter a couple years ago.” He rolled his eyes. “He’s been there like thirty times. He’s like ‘oh big triangles in the sand, whoopee.’ So that was kind of the end of my traveling, for now, at least.”

  “So you just sit here and play video games?” I asked incredulously.

  “What do you expect us to do?” Jack laughed. “We just have more time than you. What do you do with your life?”

  “I don’t know.” I lowered my eyes and thought about it. “This all just seems weird to me.”

  “Of course it does, love.” Mae gently stroked my hair. “It’s a lot to take in.”

  “You guys aren’t gonna eat me, are you?” I didn’t sound afraid, because I wasn’t. I was merely curious, and Mae laughed.

  “No, of course not,” she smiled reassuringly at me.

  “But Peter wanted to last night,” I pointed out. “And Jack really wanted to tonight, before the car crash.”

  “Jack!” Mae gasped, glaring over at him. Funny, she didn’t look even remotely appalled when I told her Peter wanted to.

  “I did not!” Jack insisted, but he was a bad liar.

  “Jack, you know you can’t do that,” Mae growled, and I wondered what the big deal was. They said that when they bit people it didn’t hurt and it didn’t kill them. So what did it really matter if Jack bit me?

  “It wasn’t my fault!” Jack said defensively. “She was getting all crazy thinking about Peter. And you know what? I didn’t bite her. So. You can just wipe that look off your face.”

  “Why does thinking about Peter make me more delectable?” I asked, and they both lowered their eyes. “Come on! I know you’re vampires! What’s left?”

  “Delectable,” Jack mused. “That’s a very good way to describe it.”

  “Why are you even telling me this?” I narrowed my eyes at them. “Why did you tell me you were vampires? Isn’t it like some big secret or something?”

  “Hardly,” Jack snorted. “I hate it that in movies when they’re all like, you can’t tell anyone that we’re vampires or the high council of snooty vampires will kill us all! There’s no high council. There’s not a big vampire society. There isn’t one council governing every human on earth.

  “And you know what?” Jack continued. “People don’t believe in vampires. Do you think that we have to hide anything about us? Did I ever really try to hide anything with you?”

  “No, but you wouldn’t tell me things,” I told him pointedly.

  “Yeah, cause I liked you. The first day we met, if
I had told you that I was a vampire, you would’ve thought I was insane and wrote me off.”

  “Why did it take so long for you to tell me?”

  “I wanted to make sure you trusted me, so you wouldn’t just think I was insane and never want to talk me again.” Then he got a pained expression on his face and sighed. “I was gonna tell you that night in the park. Then that stuff happened with that damn dog. And you got so upset when I killed it, and I thought if you react like that to me hurting a dog, how are you gonna feel when you find out that I bite people?”

  “Oh.” I thought back to that night, and I remembered the way he had threatened to end our friendship because I was crying. It had seemed rather harsh at the time, but in retrospect, that must’ve killed him. “Well, I know now. And I don’t think you’re a monster.”

  “Good.” Jack was genuinely relieved. He rubbed his bare skin. “I’m gonna go put on a shirt. I’ll be right back.” Jack darted out of the kitchen and I heard his feet pounding up the stairs.

  “You doing okay with all of this?” Mae looked at me earnestly, and I nodded. She touched my cheek gently, cupping my face, and then kissed my forehead. “Good. Did you need more water?”

  “Yeah, sure,” I nodded, and she picked up my glass and took it over to the fridge to refill it. “There’s just one thing that’s bothering me.” That was a lie. There were about fifty things bothering me, but there was only one that I wouldn’t let go for tonight.

  “And what’s that, love?” She brought the glass of water back of to me, looking curious.

  “Why did Peter leave?” I asked, and her expression faltered and she lowered her eyes. “Jack told me it was because of me.”

  “Jack doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Mae replied tersely.

  “Mae.” I stared at her until she’d look at me and then she sighed.

  “This really is a conversation for another day.” She forced a smile at me. “I’ve had a very long day, and I’d really just like to take a hot bath. I’m sure that you and Jack can think of something to amuse yourselves with.”