To my shock, there was Michele Newman. Same girl, slightly different hairdo, but it was definitely the same girl. The caption under her picture read Corrine Phillips, same age.
Mary-Christine watched my reaction closely. “It’s very rare for a vampire to have two public deaths, and have the pictorial details recorded. What you’re looking at now, is just the very tip of the iceberg.”
I sat in silence for a moment. “So the kids from Gregor Academy. They’re all alive somewhere else? Different names?”
“Mostly. The ones in the car that went under the truck are toast. No heads.”
She pulled me close. Her breath always enticed me. Strawberries. She looked at me with so much affection, it felt difficult to look away.
Man, she was cute.
“There are three kinds of people in this world, Lyman. There’s the general population - 99.999%, there’s vampires, and there’s us - the hunters.” I sat open-mouthed. “Just like there’s vampires, there’s also the alter-vampires. We call ourselves ‘Helsings’ just out of deference to old Irishman Bram Stoker. You have been tasted by a vampire, Lyman Bracks. She tasted your blood and said it burned. That, my dear Lyman, is undeniable fact. You, Lyman Bracks, whether you like it or not, are a Helsing.”
I hadn’t seen Alan in a few weeks after he moved his watchdogs into my house. Never saw much of Barton, either; that would’ve been fine ‘cept he spent most of his time in my dad’s study, smoking his cigars and drinking his scotch.
Freaking Hannah dominated my whole life. She seemed hell-bent on making me a “suitable” vampire girl. I’m not even sure what that meant. Basically I was expected to wait on her and that useless-pig-of-a-husband of hers; a Cinderella with fangs.
And of course, the longer Alan stayed away, the less of a vampire I felt. Looking at pictures of Sybille and Harvey…mom and dad…would make me cry. I couldn’t believe the things that I had been able to do to them; it was crazy, but I wished Alan would come back, let me sniff him to chase all those old human feelings away.
He didn’t, though. Not for a long time.
One night - it was nearly August and school beckoned - Hannah dragged me out of my bedroom and into the downstairs study. Barton lounged out on my dad’s leather recliner. He looked kinda pale and a compress lay over his forehead. I was so stoked at the thought he might be dying of some vampire cancer or something. Turned out he was just super hungry and being all emo about it.
“You’ve done your father a disservice,” Hannah said to me in that ultra-proper, bitchy tone of hers. “True vampires cannot thrive on the blood of beasts and fowl for prolonged periods of time.”
First of all, Barton wasn’t my “father” and I would never, ever call him that. Secondly, so the freak what? Like I cared if he didn’t like the food I brought him. Mom had once told me, “Don’t blame the delivery guy if you’re still hungry after you’ve eaten the pizza; if you want something satisfying, you gotta get off your rump and cook it yourself.”
Of course, I was scared to death of Hannah, so I didn’t say any of that.
“Alan lives on cats and he does just fine,” I said simply.
But even that got me a backhand across the face. “Never contradict your betters, girl. Bring us a worthy meal tonight or suffer the consequences.”
I’d never killed a person. Alan had been the one to slaughter my parents; all I’d done is drink their blood and sink their bodies into the lake.
Even though I wasn’t supposed to care about humans, and they were little more than livestock with iPhones, when I went out that night to finally catch one, I felt totally sick to my stomach. But, I knew if I didn’t do it, Hannah would beat the living crap out of me. I wasn’t about to give her reason to do that again.
The street was dark under the overhanging tree branches, but, my vampire eyes cut right through the night. And my hearing - it was like freaking sonar! This beetle landed on a leaf and I totally heard it loud as a firecracker.
Scents were coming at me from all directions; I isolated one: blood. Human blood. Of course there were lots of humans around, but this one stood out in the open - less than a mile away. So, I sprang toward that smell, moving so fast the world looked like smudged chalk as I ran.
Turned out hunting raccoons and squirrels had been excellent practice; I’d learned how to use all my new vampire skills against a much wilier, stealthier prey so taking down a slow-moving, dim-sensed human should prove pretty easy.
When I was only a quarter-mile down the road I started to get hungry. The blood smell was overwhelmingly enticing. My first kill may not make it back to Barton. I closed in on the house and finally got my first sight of them. They were not what I expected.
Out on their front porch, enjoying the quiet summer night, I found a woman cradling a small bundle of blankets protectively. She sang to it.
Two parts of me went to war: new vampire desires against old human sentiments. I mean, my stomach was rolling with the most painful hunger I’d ever experienced. But my heart was breaking. All I had to do was close my eyes to see me there on that porch, wrapped up in my mom’s arms…
It took everything I had in me, but I ran off - beyond where the smell could lure me back. I ended up two towns over, on a secluded stretch of railroad tracks.
Combined smells of blood, whiskey, and pee hit me hard; it was gross and totally killed my appetite. I’d go home unfed but not empty-handed.
The homeless dude had a nasty sheet thrown across a tree branch for a tent. He looked passed out drunk and it was so easy. And I was merciful and quick; just a yank and it was done.
I threw his head on the tracks, figuring the first train would obliterate it and that’d be that. I slung his decapitated body over my shoulders. He felt as light as a freaking feather.
When I presented him to Hannah and Barton, I wasn’t really expecting a “thank you.” I also wasn’t expecting what I got.
Even though Barton had lunged off the recliner and pounced on the body, taking every drop for himself, Hannah was obviously furious with me.
“This is an insult; you bring this defiled corpse? This human’s body was rotting long before it ever died. And you took the head off; it’s lost most of its blood already! Not a suitable offering to your father…”
That’s when I lost it. “He’s NOT my father!”
Before I could see her coming, Hannah had me on the ground with her hand at my throat. I really thought it was all over then.
“You have been given to us, little girl,” she said, squeezing my windpipe, “so help me - you will learn your rightful place.”
As always, the punishment was brutal and relentless. The last thing I think I did before I passed out was scream for Alan. He didn’t come.
I felt torn.
On one side, I’d been told about a world of Vampires and Helsings. A world of complete fantasy, which I had to agree, had some pretty convincing facts lying around the place.
On the other, for the first time in my life, I had a cute girl on my arm, and I didn’t want to make fun of Mary-Christine by deriding anything she told me. She was the best thing to happen to me, and I could totally see the two of us doing it one day.
So, of course I did what any red-blooded male would have done.
I went along with everything she said.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I analyzed every piece of proof she showed me. I didn’t swallow it without reservation. Science is my major at the Academy, and I knew how to look at experiments, and how to stack facts, to look for proofs, to verify her theory. Or contradict it.
So I let her continue with her ‘evidence,’ determined to either find absolute proof sometime in the future.
Before we’d left the library, she’d brought me up to date with five cases of double public deaths which, to be honest, fitted into Mary-Christine’s theories. I mean, they didn’t prove them beyond belief, or blow my mind or anything, but it seemed strange how well the facts fit.
We were standing out
side, waiting for Mary-Christine’s mom, when I made my own connection. I suddenly realized that I had possible vampire facts of my own. “The Seven,” I said, lifting my head to look at her. “The Gregor Seven.”
“What?” Mary-Christine kissed me to shake me out of my stupor.
“Eh. Seven students, all seniors.” As I spoke, I couldn’t believe I actually said the words. “They all stuck their fingers into Alan’s blood and licked it.”
“When?” her eyes were wide and animated.
“After he died. After the ambulance had taken his body away.”
“Who were they?”
I slowly closed my eyes and ticked off the names in my head. “Sharon Jones, Jeff Fielding, Billy Tankard, Elizabeth Wanrowski, Jahred Sykes, Jim Creary, and of course, Dorothy Squires.”
Mary-Christine’s face lit up like a Christmas tree. She hugged me and we kissed some more. “Man, you’re a natural.”
I grinned and patted myself on the back just for noticing. But one thing niggled at my subconscious. “So why were me and Alan friends?”
“That, I don’t know.”
I had an idea. “‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’ That’s Sun-Tzu, from the ‘Art of War.’ I dunno what class I learned it in, but I remember.”
I spent my journey home sitting in the back seat, answering seemingly dumb questions from Mary-Christine’s mom, and dwelling on Alan’s friendship. It couldn’t have meant nothing at all to him, surely; he gave me his guitar, for goodness sake; he didn’t need to do that.
When we got back to Gregor, Mary-Christine and I went up to her room ‘to study,’ and the weird thing was, we actually did. I mean, sure, we fooled around as we did it, but we did study.
She had a huge computer, and between necking sessions, we looked into the backgrounds of ‘The Seven’ with little or no success.
“How about the girl who killed Alan?” I said, suddenly excited. “We’ve heard nothing of her since the incident. I assumed she’d been arrested, but we don’t know.”
“What’s her name?”
“Mandy something.”
“Oh, that’s great,” Mary-Christine chided, with a huge grin on her face. She tapped away at the keyboard, soon had the Everton High School roll on the screen. “Junior or senior?”
“Senior, probably.”
“Mandy something. Okay, Mandy Cross! Got her.” Mary’s fingers swept over the keyboard. “I’m doing a cross-reference. That’s funny; a ‘Cross’ reference.”
We laughed ‘til the tears ran down our faces.
“No siblings, just an only child.” Mary-Christine wiped her eyes with her fingers. “Mother Sybille Cross is a housewife on the PTA. There’s a pic. Father is Harvey, an attorney at a law firm in Everton.”
So we checked the Everton Journal for Mandy Cross, but got nowhere. We even checked every edition since the murder, but there was no mention of it anywhere.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “She murdered Alan. We all saw it. There were police on the scene. The ambulance took him away. There were hundreds of witnesses.”
“Hold on a second. I may have something.” She flipped open her cell phone. “Dad? Hi. Look, Lyman and I have a question for you.”
I couldn’t believe she actually called her father. I mean, I still sat at the edge of this conspiracy; not committed and stuff, and she was going to talk to an adult about it.
“Why would there be no mention of Alan’s murder in the papers?” she asked into the phone.
My face burned kinda red, just being there.
“Right, there’s also no mention of Mandy Cross anywhere, you know, in papers and online. Yeah, she’s the girl that killed Alan.”
Pause.
“Oh, ok. I’ll explain.” She hung up. “That makes sense. Ok, Lyman, dad says it’s simple. The vampire family tells the cops they’d like no publicity for scandal’s sake. The newspaper follows the family’s wishes; local papers can do that kind of thing much easier than national ones. That takes care of that part. Now, the Mandy Cross thing is explained by a ‘silent APB.’ It’s an APB, but it’s done on the down-low, so the killers think they got away with it, but the APB is all secret and stuff. Dad says that the Cross house has been deserted for some time. The cops are around there now, still searching.”
“So your dad is a Helsing?” I asked slowly and somewhat reluctantly.
“Yeah. It’s why we’re here. Mom too, but she’s into the investigation side.”
“So you’re a Helsing from their genes?”
“Yes.”
My parents had moved here to Gregor when I was ten, dad landing a nice job with Unicorps. Before that, we’d lived across state in Leverton. “So is Helsing-ness only transferred by birth?”
She shook her head, and I sighed with relief before she answered.
“No, some just happen. And it’s more than coincidence that Helsings happen in places of high vampire occurrence.”
Somewhere deep in my mind, a penny started to drop. I pushed her from me, and looked at her. I wasn’t totally happy at the doubts rising to the surface. “You’ve only been here a month.”
“Yeah.”
“But you knew all those local cases in the library.”
She just grinned, slightly shaking her head. “I don’t know where you’re going, Lyman.”
“Well, how did you know all that local stuff if you’ve just got here?”
She leant in for a kiss, and I certainly wasn’t going to stop her. “That’s easy, kiddo. I had to study them before we arrived. Gregor has a problem with vampires, and we’re the solution.”
I realized with a grim shake of my head that my girlfriend considered herself Buffy-the-fricking-Vampire Slayer. I didn’t know if I felt scared or cool.
Or a bit of both.
I mean, Sara Michelle Gellar is hot stuff!
I ran away the next night. It seemed totally unfair; I mean - that was MY house. But Hannah and Barton had taken over. I needed to find Alan and tell him what they’d done to me. He’d make them leave. I hoped, at least.
I could only think of one place to go for help, since I had no freaking clue where Alan lived. So, I jumped from my bedroom window and skulked behind the rhododendrons until I felt sure Hannah wasn’t gonna pounce on me or something. That crazy chick had me under like, house arrest; after I brought the “unsuitable offering” home, she was super furious with me.
But, I felt pretty sure the coast was clear so I made my way down the block, keeping in the shadows. Jackson’s house was a cookie-cutter of mine and his room was on the second storey, too. No prob. I could totally climb like a spider now; and so I got to his window without breaking a sweat.
He was up. Duh. Vampires are pretty much always up.
Jackson sat bent over his guitar, practically making love to the thing. A pair of gigantic headphones were clamped over his ears, plugged into the amp. It took a few taps on the glass to get his attention. When he finally did see me, though, he really didn’t look that surprised.
Still, I flashed him my new fangs like they were some kind of backstage pass. Jackson shook his head at me, all disapprovingly, and came to let me in.
“I wondered when you were gonna come by,” he said.
“So you know what happened to me then?”
Jackson totally scolded me, “Don’t give me that crap - what ‘happened’ to you. You made a choice, Mandy…a really stupid, fucked-up choice.”
I shook like I was cold; but, it was August, so it must have been nerves or something.
“Don’t be such a dick about it,” I said. “It’s not like you didn’t make the same choice.”
“No - I didn’t, actually.”
Jackson was a big guy, kinda square-shaped. His face was cute, but a little on the pudgy side. He had long, dark hair and kept it in a braided ponytail. A lot of girls at school really liked him; probably ‘cause he had that cool musician vibe. I always thought he came off as snobby, so we never totally c
onnected even though we usually ended up in the same places at the same time. Right then I wondered if I’d made a lame call, thinking I could go to him.
He just kind of left me hanging there while he poked around in his closet. After a few minutes, he brought out this ancient-looking box and handed me a yellowing newspaper from the 1960s. It was called the Philadelphia Singer – it looked like a tabloid, and the front page headline read: “Vampire Sightings Surge!”
At first I rolled my eyes at it; then I totally remembered - wait…vampires are real. Duh. So, I read the first few lines of the article.
“Missing persons reports continue to pile up as Philadelphia’s finest scramble to respond to nightly reports of vampire sightings. Terrified witnesses testify to spotting cloaked figures lurking in shadows, attacking pets and people alike. Bodies, drained of blood, have been found in rural fields as well as urban alleyways. Nine people remain unaccounted for…”
“So, you were one of the nine?” I asked.
Jackson took the paper back, refolded it, and placed it in the box so carefully it might have been a kitten. “Before the thing had passed, they’d changed over two-hundred all together in Philly and surrounding towns. I was one of the last to be taken - and not by choice, Mandy. It was a case of wrong place, wrong time…”
“What? They just snatched you up?”
He plopped down on his bed. Jackson’s whole face changed then. He’d always been so superior (at least I thought so) but now he just looked tired.
“Back then - late fifties into the early sixties - an underground movement started within the vampire community. It wasn’t like it is now where you’ve got little cells of vampires, mostly broken down into nuclear families. It seemed more like the goddamn vampire mafia; one family in particular was led by Amos Blanche. And whatever you do, remember that name.”
“Amos believed that vampires had taken a backseat to humans and we should take our ‘rightful place’ as the dominant species. I mean, he had it all planned out with vampires taking over and breeding humans for food…like cattle. It would have thrown the whole balance off. There’s a reason there’re more lemurs than lions, Mandy. If predators ruled the world there wouldn’t be any world left, y’know. ”