Legend of the Virgin Vampire

Clean-up

 I was airborne for one second. Maybe two. Then I hit the ground so hard that my knees crunched, folded, and I rolled. It hurt, which didn't surprise me. What surprised me was that I could still get back up.

I ran, ignoring the excruciating shocks of pain from my knees. I jumped the fence, and when I say jumped, I mean jumped. I hit the ground on the other side and bit back a cry of pain. Then I slipped behind a line of trees and limped back to my house. The whole thing happened so fast that I was in my own backyard when I heard the cop yell, "Hey, Simes, there's an open window!"

I slipped into my house through the back door and sank into a kitchen chair. I was gasping, from fear and pain, exertion and shock.

Parva.

In my earlier stupor, I'd thought she'd let me live out of generosity or something. But now I remembered what she'd said right before she bit me, and the horrifying implication finally sank into my brain.

Maybe I'll teach you some empathy instead.

She'd changed me.

Not just changed me, but killed me. I could actually remember when my heart stopped. There had been a beat, another beat several seconds later, and then nothing. Yet, here I was. Breathing. Heart beating.

What was I?

A vampire, or something like it. Some real monster that all the fictional vampires were based on. A monster that might have killed Emily Harding. She wasn't my friend, but she was a person. And I'd come very, very close to killing that cop. I'd wanted to do it. Even now, the memory of the temptation made my teeth ache.

I touched one of my canines. I already expected them to be all long and pointy, just like in all the stories. But when my finger actually ran up against one of these fangs, I gagged. I couldn't. I didn't want to know. These were not my teeth.

I don't know how they got in my mouth, Officer, but they're not mine, I swear.

I needed to call the cops and tell them. Just be honest about what I'd done and let them put me in jail or a padded room or a science lab or whatever. If I didn't do it, I was going to attack someone else. Like my mother, who set the security alarm every night and would have no idea that the biggest threat to her life slept under the same roof as her. I thought back to the way she'd smelled when she'd hugged me goodbye, all warm and nourishing and comforting, and I gagged again. This time I tasted bile in the back of my throat, along with something else. Something sweet and rich, and . . .

. . . oh, no. I refused to think about that.

I made myself get up and go upstairs to my bathroom. My knees cursed me the whole way. When I opened the door and turned on the light, a scene straight out of Psycho greeted me. The inside of the tub was splashed with pink, bloody water. There were rusty footprints on the white bathmat.

The clothes I'd been wearing when Parva attacked me were strewn all over the floor. My shirt and jacket were too dark to make out the blood, and my mother had probably never seen it. But I could smell it. Not just my blood, but hints of Parva's meat-locker odor and marijuana smoke from that other guy. Parva's first victim.

It hit me how much trouble this was going to get me in. If Emily lived, she'd tell the cops that I attacked her and they would tear this house apart looking for evidence. They'd find these clothes, do a DNA test, and link me to a murder across town of a victim who'd been attacked in the same way as Emily. And my mother would, in her innocence, corroborate their theory. She'd have to tell them how she'd found me down there, all beaten up as though I'd been in a life-or-death battle.