CVU1

Chapter 1: Evicted

Staring into a golden swirl of piss churning in the white bowl below me, I first felt the change. A cold trickling down from heart to bladder, a dryness in my mouth, twitching fingers. Brightness. The white brick wall was blurring away as my eyeballs teared and burned, and I had to squint.

The bowl was full of swirling red. My eyes widened, searing the retinas.

Retroactive sense would come, or mostly come. The slow reconstruction of events would have been easier if I had been a heavier drinker. Who, what, when, where and why. C'mon, you can do it.

The cold trickle inside my quivering body intensified, and my mortal blood continued to churn in the porcelain bowl.

Me ... pissing blood ... no idea when ... somewhere on campus ... after that bite. That bite deserved a whole new journalistic breakdown. That quick pale bitch ... while I was walking home, lunging from somewhere ... last night, or the night before?

Losing focus. The memory cards were still shuffling in my head.

The bite! Two hot points near the base of my neck on the right side, suddenly all I could feel. I reached to the wound with a shaking hand. But I had checked in the mirror, and there had been no pain ...

Special wound, didn't see anything in the mirror, seemed like a dream, thought the whole thing was a nightmare ...

Leaving the stall now, flexing my bladder muscles to stop pissing. Irrational, as if that might stop me from bleeding to death. Oh, it was so bright. That's so clear in my memory.

And the mirror. What I saw in the mirror. Can't ever forget that.

If I had been thinking in any supernatural direction I might have considered any of at least three possibilities: werewolf, zombie or vampire. I'm sure there were other things from many other cultures going bump in the night and converting people with a special magical bite that could turn invisible and then come back. The delirium stirred memories and nightmares and even passing thoughts together. Looking in the mirror made me think of H.G. Wells's invisible man, and suddenly I was seeing my crumpled student's clothes held up by nothing in that mirror. How had they done that, in that old movie?

Thinking feebly at this question for nearly a minute, I then realized that I had no reflection. I was a slow learner, at the very beginning.

Well, almost no reflection. A faint red spiderweb of capillaries remained visible to define the outline of my face, catching even the details of my nostrils, lips and eyelids as I stared harder, the blood vessels floating as if suspended in perfect glass. I hadn't completely drained myself. My bladder was straining with the last of my human mortality, backing up the whole evacuation process that would leave me perpetually dry, perpetually in need of infusions from the prey I would claim as a ...

"Don't say it," I mumbled. But my new teeth bit my tongue.

So there was the answer, of the three options. No howling at the moon, no brain munching. Arguably the best option.

The old woman then stormed into the men's bathroom and kicked me outside. If I ever learned what the hell was going on, it would be in motion.

***

For the completely uninitiated: vampires can't just go where they please. Invitations were necessary for first entry into a residence. I had yet to learn all the complicated magical legalese involved in invitations and how some invitations applied to whole buildings and others to just rooms, the rules about guests inviting unclean spirits into homes that they did not own, the longevity of an invitation, what to do when the inviter died, etc. My immediate lesson from the old woman was to learn precisely why vampires had to stop and ask permission: