Legend of the Virgin Vampire

High

The next thing I remember is trees. Tree after tree, whizzing past a car window as I rested my head on the glass. The window was cold and it felt good against my forehead. I lay there for a minute, eyes squinted to block out the sun, the heat from my skin diffusing out into the October air.

My mother's voice came to me in pieces at first, and I struggled to find meaning in the words. I rolled away from the window and faced her so I could block out the bird chatter and road noise from my right ear, but by then I'd already missed the point. I asked her to repeat herself.

"I said, I'd like to get my hands on whoever did this to you."

"Did what to me?"

"This!" She gestured at me with one hand while driving with the other. "Sheesh, Nathaniel, you're really out of it. Forget the police station for now. We're going to the ER. We can file a report from there."

There was nothing coherent in my thoughts to cling to. I almost let myself go back to sleep, but Mom was rambling about CAT scans and her sense of urgency finally pushed some memories to the front of my brain. Parva the vampire. The biting and the pain. It wasn't until much later that I also remembered the punching and the dying. Maybe I was repressing it, I don't know. But for now, all I could feel was relief. Parva said she never spared anyone, but she had spared me. I laughed, and Mom shot a suspicious look at me.

"Nathaniel?"

"Huh?"

"Are you sure you weren't . . ." She hesitated, but then hurried on with: ". . . doing drugs?"

"Mom. No."

"Well, how am I supposed to know? You still haven't told me what happened. You were gone all night, and then you call me from some street corner in the middle of nowhere. All I know is someone tried to strangle you, but---"

"Strangle me?"

"Don't you remember? Your neck is black and blue."

I pulled down the visor so I could see my neck in the mirror. As she said, it was covered with bruises. I couldn't help but laugh again. Parva was sucking all over my neck like an overgrown leech, and she'd left her love bites to prove it. She gave one hell of a hickey, that was for sure.

Mom was staring at me in shock, and that's when I realized, to my frustration, that I'd said some of those thoughts out loud. What exactly had I said? I decided I didn't care. I opened and closed my hands, watched my fingers curling in toward my palms and reaching out into open air. Not dead. I'd looked the Medusa in the eye and survived. I felt like a god.

"What's going on with you?" Mom asked.

It would be no use trying to explain about Parva. Judging by the look on Mom's face, anything I said was going to be taken for a drug-induced hallucination. I had a suspicion that this was going to cause trouble for me down the line.

"Nothing," I said.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "We don't need a hospital, do we?"

"I don't think so."

"The police?"

Right. Like they would believe me. Even if they did, it's not like they could do anything to stop someone like Parva, short of nuking the entire metro area.

"You will explain this to me," said Mom. "In detail, as soon as you snap out of whatever it is you need to snap out of. Do you understand me?"

"Yes, ma'am."

She drove me home. We went into the house through the garage. It wasn't until I was inside, with the garage door closed behind me, that I realized what a relief it was to be out of the sun. Everything was painful out there, too bright and way too clear.