Vampire Weekend

Sunday Afternoon

Someone saw the fire. Lyla wasn't sure how, but that was the only explanation she could think of for why the long gravel driveway was packed with people arguing with each other in hushed voices while an ambulance and a fire engine loitered in the street.

"We have to go in there," a man insisted.

"We can't," a woman said. "It's his home."

"Then we can get the humans to go inside," a boy suggested, pointing towards the two emergency vehicles.

The woman snorted delicately. "Humans won't last a second against him."

"I told you that kid was going to be trouble," Monsieur Leblanc grumbled.

Wait, Monsieur Leblanc?

Lyla blinked. No, the sunlight wasn't messing with her vison that much, she was seeing that correctly. Monsieur Leblanc was standing at the head of the crowd with his arms crossed across his chest and his eyes narrowed at every other vampire who looked at him.

Every person standing there was a vampire.

Lyla walked towards them, making sure that gravel crunched underneath her feet. They all went silent and looked towards the sound.

Monsieur Leblanc was the first to make a move. In a blink he ran and appeared beside Lyla, speaking to her rapidly in French.

"Parle lentement," Lyla said, "ou parler en Anglais."

That was pretty much the extent of her French.

Monsieur Leblanc took a deep breath. "Are you alright?"

Lyla blinked at him. "Not really."

The baby squirmed in her arms and commanded attention by letting out a cry. Lyla looked down at the baby and back up at the group of vampires.

"Does anyone know whose baby this is?"

There was a very brief whirlwind of activity that resulted in Lyla and the baby being looked over by the paramedics while Lyla tried to answer questions fired at her by two female vampire cops dressed all in black.

Huh, so those did exist, vampires that dressed all in black, that is. Vampire cops were common knowledge.

"Are you sure that he's dead?" the taller of the two vampire women asked for the third time.

"I saw him decay," Lyla insisted. "Why won't you just go check the house?"

"We're having some trouble with the fire that you set," the shorter woman said, "but we'll get there."

She looked sideways at the taller woman, who swallowed whatever it was that she had been going to say.

"Can I go home now?" Lyla asked, looking from the two vampires to the paramedics and back.

The paramedics nodded. "You've just got some first-degree burns," one of them said. "You'll be fine in a few days."

"We're going to have to arrest you," the tall vampire woman said flatly.

"What?" Lyla exclaimed.

"No, we're not," the short vampire woman said. "It was self-defence, Charlotte."

"Ninety percent of newborn male vampires can't be held responsible for their actions in the first three years after conversion," the tall vampire, Charlotte, argued. "What he did was no reason for her to kill him."

That was something Lyla hadn't learned in biology. It was nice to know that the man could have gotten away with murder.

"He killed me," Lyla said. "Isn't that enough of a reason?"

The two vampire women looked at her.

"You look very much alive to me," Charlotte said, wrinkling her nose.

Well, the number of vampires in the area was probably messing with the bioelectricity sensor thing that older vampires could use to figure out who was a human and who was a vampire. Lyla took a breath to say something to that effect and choked.

Not again. Hadn't it only been a few hours?

The short woman was the first to realize what was happening. She darted into the ambulance and in half a second was back with a bottle of blood that she uncapped and handed to Lyla.

"Thanks," Lyla gasped after she'd drained the bottle without stopping to breathe once she was able to. "Now can I go home?"

"Yes," the short woman said before her partner could say anything. "Yes, you can go home."

Monsieur Leblanc ran part of the way with her since Lyla didn't know which way to go to get home from the farmhouse. He stopped at the end of her street and waited while she went three houses down and knocked at her front door.

No purse meant not cell phone and no house keys.

The sound of footsteps came towards the front of the house. The door opened and Lyla's mother stood in the doorway for several moments, completely stunned.

"Hi, Mom," Lyla said.

Her mother let out a cry and threw her arms around her. Lyla hugged her back, very lightly so that her mother wouldn't be crushed by her new strength.

"My baby," her mother sobbed. "My baby, I thought I'd lost you!"

"I'm here, Mom," Lyla said. "I'm home."