Children of Van Helsing

Chapter Four - The Old Woman

Susanna

Three vampire women were sitting in a corner, close to each other, embracing one another and looking at us as if we were the monster and not them. If you didn’t know they were vampires – and I knew – than you would think they were just human. The thing about vampires is, they look human. Except if you’re trained to see they aren’t. They have regular eyes (if they attack they turn red, though), normal hair, and normal teeth and nails as long as they’re not attacking. In general, they are a bit paler. But if you were black before you were turned, you are going to be black afterwards. You just loose the healthy, human blush you have when you’re alive. You’re cold. The look in your eye is different, because you vision is incredibly good, you see so much more and might look at something humans cannot see. I can tell if somebody is a vampire by merely looking at them. And these three women were.

In another corner, there was an old woman with grey silver hair, not looking at us at all. She was looking at nothing in particular. As if she was possessed. Her eyes were bleeding, as if she was crying tears.

It looked like the vampire women in the corner were more afraid of her than they were of us – and that’s why I didn’t shoot.

“What’s going on here?” I asked.

“Is she alright?” Regina asked concerned.

One of the women, the oldest one, blonde and with blue eyes, shook her head. She looked me in the eye.

“Shoot her. Please, shoot her. Do something.” She begged.

She was asking me to… Kill one of her own? I hadn’t expected that.

“Why?” Regina asked.

The young woman next to her, with black hair, softly began to cry. The blonde woman sighed.

“There’s something wrong with her. She’s usually very calm and kind, but then she went and killed those people upstairs…” She shook her head. “She wrote the words on the wall. She’s insane. She doesn’t answer to anything we say.”

“She killed those three people?” Regina asked.

The woman nodded. I knew Regina now felt bad, because she thought we had killed the wrong people for the wrong crime, but to be honest, it had been self-defence. As long as these women didn’t attack us, they didn’t have to die.

“How long has she been like this?” My sister asked. I was still too stunned to talk – vampires never asked a hunter to kill their family. Because the woman was. Not in blood, though. If a vampire joins a nest, they are automatically family.

“It started an hour before she suddenly went upstairs.” The blonde woman said. Then the woman who hadn’t talked yet, with dark skin and hair which was dyed purple, started talking.

“She was mumbling something about a prophecy. She kept saying ‘it’s time’. She drew the mark on the wall outside as well. We don’t know what’s wrong with her.”

I looked at the old woman again. She was still staring into the abyss, not paying attention to us.

“Just kill her.” The black-haired woman said. “It will be better. This is not grandma. She’s gone.”

The bloody tears running out the old woman’s eyes dripped on the floor and began forming a puddle. I noticed her clothes, hands and face were covered in old, dried blood, still from the attack.

“Why haven’t you just killed her yourself?” I asked.

The black woman looked at me as if I had just suggested to jump off Tower Bridge wearing nothing but pink fluffy boots. “She’s still family! We couldn’t!”