The Vampire Always Bites Twice | Wattys 2022 Grand Prize Winner

62

This chapter contains mature and violent content, and references to animal harm.

Greg, In Grave (Wink) Danger

When I was a boy... that was so, so long ago. When I was boy, I had a particularly bothersome loose tooth. It wiggled and dangled in my mouth for days longer than it was welcomed. Eventually, I was so perturbed by the stupid thing I tied a string around it and yanked. Popped out, before it was ready, in a bloody pulp.

Why was I thinking about this?

There was a pressure. On my skin and in my lungs and my teeth and bones. Taunt yet soft? Urging and insistent but gentle. A warm hand against my cheek. Firm tug of my hair. A delicate whisper in my ear.

Wake up.

My blood warmed. Slowly. Pleasantly. Liquid heat tingled in my veins, chasing away a cold numbness that seemed to encase me.

Wake up. Wake up.

And then my heart beat. Hit me. Slammed me. Like a fanging shot to the chest. The muscle sprung to life fast and frantic.

That pressure, that tight, persistent, pressure centered in my fangs, pulled.

Wake. Up.

Gasping, I lurched forward, thrust into the waking world by the weight pinched around my fangs. There was pain. In my belly. Deep and searing. Burning. Yet I was cold. My whole body surrounded by a wet chill.

I opened my eyes.

And hissed.

Fangs!

It was bright. Too bright. Flung an arm over my eyes. What the fanging hell? Why was it so fanging bright? Burned my eyes. Blurred my vision. Specks and splashes of neon colors danced behind my eyelids. Sweet hell that hurt.

Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

A shudder coursed up my spine. I needed to get up. To go. To follow that... that feeling. Insistent and overwhelming and making my pulse surge.

Groaning, I opened my eyes again. Slower (no, faster, go, go, go, get up). I blinked. The world was white. I was outside. It was snowing. The sky gray and so, so bright and snowing. A torrent of white flakes fell on my face and chest and hands... my pale hands. Fangs, you could white balance a camera off these mitts.

Was it... daylight?

I squinted up, hand as a shield over my eyes. That sky. It was overcast but unmistakably sunny behind the clouds. I remembered that. The way clouds looked with the sun trapped behind them. Peaceful and foreboding, all at once. Haven't seen it in centuries. But I remembered. It was day. I was awake and it was day.

No. No. That couldn't happen.

Where the sweet hell even was I? Hey, now, believe it or not but I ain't the kind of vamp that makes a habit of blacking out and waking up in strange tombs. In daylight no less.

A tunnel of earth surrounded me. Dirt and snow scraped against my shoulders and the soles of my feet. It was tight. Too tight, for my liking. Suffocating. Too much like being... in the ground... what the fangs, was I in the ground?

How was that possible?

I blinked into the sun. For a moment, glimmering there in the light, I thought I caught the trail of a red thread leading from my mouth and out and over the top of the pit. It was taunt. Pulling hard at my incisors.