Fawn's Blood, page 2
“Slayer!” he shouted, as if it was a cause for alarm, and not relief.
“I just saved your life,” I said to the guy. “That was a vampire.”
“You killed my wife,” he screamed at me. “I’ll kill you!”
In the dark, yellow-black light of the water reflecting the streetlamps, his eyes were wide and insane. I pushed at him, but he got his hands on my neck. Which is why it was lucky that Brid ran up at that moment and hit him on the head with a wrench. She pulled me out from beneath him.
We looked at his form, crumpled on the ground. He was bleeding. This was a major problem, not least because the vampires in the area would smell fresh blood.
“I’ll call 911 in a second. Don’t tell anyone about this,” Brid said. She’s always been the more decisive one. I felt a lurch, and I looked at her in horror, but I was distracted by someone else running toward us. It was a vampire, fangs out, forehead wrinkly.
“Sam!” the vampire yelled. “Sam, are you okay?”
It saw us and stopped, its yellow eyes glowing in the night. Then it saw Brid’s wrench, and my stake.
“Shit,” the vampire said. Brid surged forward, wrench in one hand and stake in the other and tried to stake him, but he danced backward, facing us. He took out his phone and started to type. “You guys are slayers, huh.”
“Damn straight,” Brid said. She tried to get at his phone, but he circled her. I was back up on my feet by now, between him and the body on the ground behind us.
“Well, you fucked up,” the vampire said.
This time, Brid got the vampire in the chest as he tried to run around us to get to the old guy on the ground. He dissolved into ash. Once you know the technique, vampires are really easy to kill. I coughed again. The guy had dropped his necklace when we staked him. I picked it up. It was silver-colored, but not silver. It was in the shape of a bent bat wing, shaped like half a heart. I stuck it in my pocket.
I felt my phone buzz, and saw it was my mom: Where the hell are you? Get into position. Sunrise is in half an hour and I’m going to smoke these fuckers out.
“We have to get back toward the house,” I told Brid.
“Wait, we have to call 911,” I said, and I paused, dialing. Brid was running ahead, so I jogged to keep up. I described the location of the body to the dispatcher; I said he looked homeless.
I should have told my mom we’d been seen. Then she could have made a plan.
The dew was wet on our ankles as we jogged back up through the dark, mostly quiet neighborhoods to the loud rancor of the house on Bagley. We were supposed to slide into position, hidden in a bush where the vampires couldn’t see us, and then prevent the ones leaving the tunnel from going inside the house and vice versa. Brid was panting, exhilarated—and in hindsight, I should have known she wasn’t thinking straight either. We both lay on our bellies in the bark. I kept seeing the wrench hit the old guy’s skull.
I felt the boom under us as my mom’s homemade explosives went off in the tunnel.
“I think I can start to see the sky getting light,” Brid said, as we crouched in a rhododendron near the manhole.
I turned to look, and that was when I saw Cain right behind us, standing on the railing of the porch. I had seen him before, in pictures, but never in person, this close. If you glance at him from afar, he looks young-ish, a semi-androgynous, short, awkwardly proportioned guy, his chest narrower than his belly and hips. He wears velvet blazers that look not so much like they are Victorian as they are the 1970s remembering something Victorian, with really wide lapels. He had white hair flowing back from his face and slicked to his skull, pouty red lips, and a thin, scraggly goatee slicked to a chin already covered in blood. As we watched, his face morphed into his ridged, fanged form.
I turned and threw a stake, but he moved—too fast—and landed on me, wrestling me to the wet dirt before I could get my stake.
“You won’t kill us this time,” he hissed.
As he hugged me to him, I could see his skin up close, crinkled, mottled white, like glaciers run through with red rust. His nose flared out from its center as he smelled my hair, becoming like a bat’s—wide, nostrils open, curves of flesh folded down and up. He bared his fangs in my face. He had known to expect us. The vampire we killed must have texted him.
“Run,” I said to Brid, and pushed her, leaning away from Cain, trying to pull him off balance. She did run, turning and sprinting away, leaving me straining. I thought maybe she’d get my mom.
Cain’s sharp fingernails hooked into my skin, and at the same time he reached out to press a button hidden in the paneling of the house, making the earth beneath us collapse. We fell into a hole. Cain’s nails tore through my skin, anchoring me to his breast in the dark, dirt falling on both of our heads as we landed on hard cement. His nails grew longer as I writhed against him, webbing spinning between his fingers, Cain’s forearms lengthening, his snout growing wolfish, the teeth jutting from his top gums down in the near-darkness. I hadn’t known vampires could do that. White fur grew around his muzzle. Red tears dripped from his eyes.
“You killed my boyfriend, little one,” Cain said, in the dark. His voice was like a chainsmoking college girl’s. “You have been taught to kill and kill. Enough of it. Look up. This is the only image you will see while your heart beats.” I looked up, and in front of the moon, I saw my mom, standing, holding a crossbow pointed at us. She wouldn’t shoot, for fear of hitting me. Her shadow was dark, and I couldn’t see her face.
“Get down, Rachel,” she said, but I couldn’t break from his grasp.
As his fangs sank into my neck, I thought I was going to die, though my screams died in my throat. He pressed another button, I guess, and a trap door slid slowly shut, slamming us into earthy darkness. His breath was cool, where Brid’s had been warm. His lips, though, were hot—I guess from drinking living blood. He held me there for what seemed like forever, gulping my blood, far more than ten minutes, fifteen. I was dizzy in the dark. My knees were weak. Each time I tried to move, his grip tightened, and his fingers were longer around me, sharp.
“Drink from me. Eat well. I want you to know pain like me. I hate you, but I know you. I think you want it too.”
He bit his own wrist hard, so the blood flowed thick, and stuck it, bleeding, into my mouth. I didn’t want to die. I swallowed, and swallowed again, because there was dirt in my mouth. It wasn’t my fault. I drank and came back from the brink.
And that’s how I became a vampire.
MARCH
(Seven months later)
2.
FAWN
I didn’t exactly allow myself to believe what I was doing was real until I got on the bus. This was, I thought to myself, a kind of vengeful, crazy, grieving friend thing. Not a real thing, not exactly. But if he was out there—I texted him, and then messaged him on Facebook Messenger, Tumblr, Twitter and Instagram. All the same thing: If you’ve run off to be a vampire without me, and haven’t told me, I’m going to be so fucking pissed, Silver. You absolute asshole.
I watched the little gray bubble underneath the message turn blue. Read.
Probably his parents had his phone.
I hadn’t seen the body, but the coroner had. He would have had to lie still a long time. And I wasn’t sure if they’d have cut him open.
Next, I messaged Cain. I hadn’t talked to him in months—he had liked a couple of my posts, but we weren’t like, talk-all-the-time mutuals anymore. It was also embarrassing to have been such a huge fan of someone who I understood now to be probably kind of a fake person, a character. Nobody really was the way he acted. It was roleplay. Crazy vampires who talked about vampires ruling the world weren’t people who really existed, turning people, they were just something right-wingers made up to prevent vampire clinics showing up in their town. Probably Cain was some sad nobody somewhere, like me. Maybe not even really a vampire. I didn’t know what I would say to him. I wrote, on Tumblr Messages: Hey, this is weird and awful and feels really weird to write you about on here. Silver killed himself last night. His girlfriend said he had been talking about running away and living with you. I was just wondering, is that true? Have you been in touch with him? I’m not on good terms with his family, so nothing you say to me will make it to them. I just want to understand.
One day after the funeral which I was not invited to, I walked—sleepwalked—to the cemetery, where I knew he was, or must be. It took an hour to get there, to the family grave where his grandfather was buried. The gravestone next to that one was new, and shiny. The name engraved there was not Silver. The last name was his. It was weird, I thought, to think of him there, cold, below the ground beneath the wrong name. I knelt to press my face to the earth, thinking about Mary Shelley and how she carried Percy’s heart around with her until she died.
The earth beneath was muddy and, oddly, turned up.
I knew that new graves didn’t get turfed over right away, and that the soil was often kind of loose initially, when they buried someone. But this was more than that. It looked like a huge mole had just burrowed out of it. Rocks and sticks and grass twisted at the edge. And something shiny, in the dirt, caught my eye. I bent down to take it.
A bat’s wing, sharp on the edges, chain still dangling, snapped at the clasp. I held it up to my own necklace, and it made a perfect heart.
The coffin would have been closed; it couldn’t have fallen out.
The mud around the grave was trodden on, and there were many sets of footprints. I stood there, holding the necklace.
The driver on the Greyhound bus didn’t ask to see my ID, or my vax card, or anything. I just got on, and twenty minutes later, we left town, driving to DC, where the bus would veer west. The sun glimmered briefly through gray clouds and disappeared. I was one of just a handful of people on board. I had chosen my outfit carefully—I wanted to look like a girl, and look Goth, but also didn’t want to draw too much attention to myself. I had my school backpack with me, two changes of pants, one skirt, and four shirts stuffed into the interior alongside my copy of The Vampire Armand, a pack of gum, a toothbrush, three KN95 masks, deodorant, a new set of razors—the girl kind with lots of blades—and a pack of Camels I thought I could maybe offer to someone in exchange for information on where to sleep. My hair was down. I had some eyeliner on. Most of my face was hidden under my black mask. The rest of my outfit was black and unornamented. I wore both halves of the bat necklace over my shirt.
I had not told Flo I was going.
I had my phone, which I had gone back and forth about. Ultimately, even though it could potentially be used to track me down, I did need a phone. On my blog, I had posted, Do I know any mutuals in Seattle who could put me up?
I had four thousand, two hundred and thirty-seven followers on Tumblr. That didn’t mean that much, because a lot of those accounts weren’t active anymore, and a lot of the other ones just followed me to re-blog my pictures of graveyards.
Cain hadn’t written back.
And also—there was something else happening with Silver’s Tumblr.
There had been five new posts on the blog since he died. All of the pictures in the mermaid series he’d been drawing—women with dark gills and frightening teeth.
All of them had been posted in the last twenty-four hours before I hopped on the bus.
That wasn’t in itself proof that he was alive. His timed queue was still going, and probably would for a while. It was weird that he would have queued art to post like that, all in a row, but it wasn’t impossible. If he had plugged them into his queue before committing suicide, there might be a weird message in there. Something he meant to share, after he died.
But the likes tab?
I was pretty sure that the last thing he had liked before the funeral was a giveaway post that had this picture of this fancy dragon ring with a red stone. Now the first thing visible when you clicked on his likes tab was a picture of the full moon with pink text reading: trans men who don’t bind are valid.
That wasn’t something his parents would have liked when going through his Tumblr. I didn’t even think that they knew how to access his Tumblr. Unless someone else had access to his account. But why would they?
I was straddling the border of reality and something else.
On his fifteenth birthday, back in 2020, we got suspended for wearing Dracula capes to school because it was too offensive. At his house that night I asked Silver what he thought it was like to drink blood.
“Like this,” he said, immediately, and went to his knife collection.
He cut a little notch in his hand and I drank blood out of it, which was the closest my body had been to his body at that point. He tasted like salt and metal, like when I had licked the playground pole in kindergarten. Then I cut my hand and he drank. It was kind of funny—he and I could drink each other’s blood and be totally normal humans, still, but if a vampire did it, it was illegal. The only difference was that vampires would have saliva that could keep the blood flowing longer and maybe cure your ailments, and their face would go monster-wrinkly, and their eyes would go yellow or red, and they’d need it more.
It would be cool, I thought, to have someone need the very blood in my body. To be useful just by existing. To be necessary for another person’s life—even if it did nothing, physically for me. Even if it hurt me. I wondered if it felt different, if a vampire did it. With Silver, it felt good.
During sleepovers Silver and I stayed up all night on YouTube combing through interviews with people who were vampires, who were registered and got the blood bags in the big liberal cities that did that. The videos were from before the July 2020 blood shortage: the ones from local news channels in the 2000s were about how it was nice not to need to hurt themselves or others to live, and to have somewhere safe from the sun, and how nice it was for the cities to give vampires what they needed to live. Most of the vampires had already lived in big cities, before the Recognition Act. The municipal government videos said that once vampires had been given the option of bagged blood and banned from drinking blood from living people, most of them switched, so the cities were safer now for everyone. There were new vlogs by registered vampires who said that they were okay with living on one bag, now that the ration had been cut. There were some videos where people sounded more like Cain and talked about how the blood banks starved vampires slowly, and made vampires distant from each other, and housing was hard to find, and how there should be more humans who gave their blood willingly, because it was good for humans too. Usually, those videos got removed.
There was one channel from a guy who claimed to be doing interviews with really old vampires, who would describe historical events they’d experienced, but his channel got shut down by Google for promoting illegal activity because the vampires would talk about drinking blood and hunting. That was the thing with the more interesting channels—they usually got deleted. A lot of history and medical articles about vampires were behind paywalls, too. You could get the old New York Times articles from before the Recognition Act through the library. “vampire den busted with a bang,” that kind of thing. The tone they used was somewhere between fear and humor, like in old vampire movies. Some of the old articles had photos of vampire ash. If you searched vampire getting staked online, there were shaky found-footage videos that were out there, on the same websites where the Saddam Hussein execution was. Silver watched those, had theories about where the slayers lived. I didn’t like it when he talked about it.
There was one vlog that ended right after the guy making it, who was obsessed with vampires and posted a bunch of vampire movies with his commentary, got turned into a vampire. His last video was about the physical changes he was going through. He said he couldn’t reveal anything about his sire.
“My life never made sense before,” the guy said. “Now it does. I know what I am.”
We paused the video, and Silver leaned forward, studying the hint of sharp bone beneath the vampire guy’s forehead, where his vampire ridges would be when he was hungry. He’d gotten ridges tattooed on, before he turned. The real ridges were in a slightly different place. Silver and I looked at each other, after looking.
“Cringe, but hot,” Silver said. I laughed. I’d been thinking the same thing.
That night was the first night we made out, even though we’d slept in the same room a lot.
A couple months later, when we were on lockdown and talking to Cain more, and Silver was writing letters back and forth with him, Cain had sent us the set of bat wing necklaces. It came with a letter about how his community was dying, the old ones being killed by the state because of the pandemic. I thought Cain was probably roleplaying, like Silver was, but I knew from news that the shortage was real enough. In Seattle and NYC and LA and Chicago, they had been feeding all these old vampires blood, and now they’d cut the ration because of the Covid-19 blood shortage. There might be hundreds that had starved. Now, Cain said, we would be a new generation of vampires, saving each other and the world. When you slid the two bat wing necklaces together, they formed a heart.
Silver was hooking up with Flo by then, but they hadn’t started dating until later, and when they did start, he didn’t stop wearing the necklace.
Forever, the text on the back of the bat wings said. I felt weird about Cain sometimes, because he was one of those internet people you really know nothing about, but he understood something about me. I had worn my necklace every day, and Silver had worn his, for the year and a half after that.
