Vampires do not dream – that was one of the many minor downsides to the curse Alejandro had come to name in his time. He had gained a newfound appreciation for benign things – aging, dreaming, eating delicious food. Even exercising looked like so much fun to him when others did it these days. If only he had taken his time to experience at least some of those things before his first demise. If only. Although many humans wished to live like so, being forever 20 years old does have its downsides. You never fully mature; that's one of them.
Alejandro felt hands gripping his shoulders tightly. Whoever they belonged to was shaking him furiously.
"Wake up," a voice whispered, "Please, it's important."
Alejandro's eyes flew open and he sat up instinctively. The panicking redhead sitting next to him on the bed leaned back in surprise.
"Wha-" Alejandro opened his mouth to speak, but Tilly put her hand over his mouth to hush him. Her eyes whipped to the bedroom door, which was slightly ajar. From the gap, Alejandro could see a key on the lock.
"Speak quiet," Tilly's voice was extremely hushed, Alejandro strained to hear her properly.
"Why?" he mouthed.
"The dogs might hear," she hurriedly explained, her gaze restlessly moving from him to the door.
"Dogs?"
"The Brees came. I said I would go to my room and came to wake you up. I was scared they would hurt you." She was now trembling slightly.
"How did you even get in?" Alejandro asked, still half asleep.
"I had a key. I hid it from dad in case they came."
A creek of the stairs had her attention at the door again. It sounded like it came from the lower side of the landing.
"I will talk to them." Alejandro went to get up.
"There are so many!" Tilly whispered, and tried to keep him from doing so. "I counted five."
"Just five?" Alejandro smiled. "I have seen a hundred angry people try to get to me and fail all at once." He patted her shoulder and stood. Tilly got up as well and went to walk ahead of him. In the case of a dog jumping to grab him, he supposed it would be safer for her if he walked ahead, but then again, he sensed no anger in the air. Only fear, from Tilly, and copious amounts of confusion wafting from downstairs. As they rounded the corner onto the landing, the scraping of dog's nails on the wood floor sounded as a red furry figure skittered into the hall to hide. As he came lower and lower, Alejandro could make out a figure standing at the open front door. It wasn't a dog – it was too big and the fur was too long, too coarse. It was the size of a wolf, but with the colour of a fox, and it had legs like a deer. The legs were long; so long that if the creature stood on two legs it would easily reach the ceiling. The shoulder of it reached past his hip. Even though Alejandro wasn't the tallest man, he knew this creature looked big for the average man as well. It wasn't a wolf either, as its face was too fox-like.
The creature guarding the door perked up as it spotted him. As Alejandro stepped on the ground floor, he noticed the smaller creature in the hallway. It was almost half the size of the one at the door, and seemed a lot younger. The small one wagged its tail and tilted its head, but then looked toward the sofa and its ears pressed back. Then he spotted the one on the sofa. It was spread all across the two seats of it like it owned the place. Its eyes went from the small one to Alejandro, with the cold, hard look in them not changing at all. The one at the door seemed the biggest by far, but this one was not small either. None of them were.
The chatter that had been constantly streaming from the kitchen finally registered in Alejandrio's mind. He and Tilly stepped into the kitchen, where a curious scene awaited them. On the floor was another red creature, the same size as the one on the sofa. Its eyes were glued to Mr Mazie, who sat calmly at the round dining table. He had poured himself another cup of coffee, and on the table was Tilly's mug, half empty. The person who captured Alejandro's attention, however, stood in the middle of the kitchen, talking with Mr Mazie. She was tall, strong looking, and strangely handsome for a female. Pointy ears poked from under her raven black hair, which was as thick and well-combed as her masculinely beautiful eyebrows. Her dark brown eyes tracked to Alejandro the moment he stepped into the room. Her expression was cold, but not in a callous way. Rather, she seemed calculated – even professional.
"Blood?" She spoke with a surprisingly feminine voice when she was done eyeing him up and down. Alejandro blinked, not understanding the question, but it seemed he didn't need to. A sound of paws on the floorboards came from behind him, and a second later something heavy leaned against him. The moist noise of a canine sniffed the air at the back of his neck, then next to his ear. Before he could react, it thumped back on all fours on the floor. As it walked back to the living room, it firmly shook its whole body, as if it was wet. Alejandro glanced back to see it returning back to the sofa. The one at the door and the small one next to that one seemed more curious than cautious.
"Good." The woman stated firmly. "Clear for now." There was a note of careful optimism in her voice.
"I told you," Mr Mazie said calmly but firmly. The woman gave him a warning look, to which he didn't take kindly. He rose up slowly and leveled a warning look of his own toward her and the creature at her feet. "Now, collect your pack and leave. I'm done with you disturbing my guest and my and my daughter's breakfast." The woman looked ready to argue, but Mr Mazie pointed toward the door. "I'm done with the Bree politics, out." His tone was firm, but the calmness was starting to wear off. The woman let out a breath and scrunched up her nose for a moment in an odd way. The gesture would have been childish for a human to make, but as she was a were-creature of some kind, it read as more animalistic. Before Alejandro could analyze her any further, the woman turned and walked toward the door. Tilly put herself in between Alejandro and the woman as she passed, and when the creature following her passed Tilly followed it with her eyes and made herself to even more of a wall between him and it by putting her hands up on her side and standing wide. The creature seemed amused by this and calmly trotted after the woman. One by one, all of them followed her out the door, with the last one being the biggest one that had guarded the door. It glanced back curiously and briefly made eye contact with Alejandro, before galloping after the others. From the living room window, he could see five canine figures running down the road and disappearing into the distance.
Tilly sighed loudly in relief and relaxed, her back resting against Alejandro's chest for a moment. Alejandro patted her shoulder and stepped out of the corner she had shoved him in.
"Are you two okay?" he asked. Mr Mazie rubbed the back of his neck in the manner older human males often did when tired.
"They make life a bit hard sometimes. The Brees think they own the place." Mr Mazie sighed. Then he peered into the living room. "Did they make a mess?" He walked out of the kitchen to inspect the situation with the air of a middle-aged woman going, "Don't touch my throw pillows." Alejandro's eyes moved to the pan on the stove. Despite having no sense of smell for these things, he had a feeling something might be burning.
It wasn't, it turned out, although it might have done so soon. Alejandro did not care, as instinct took over and he started flipping the thin slices of pork in the pan and inspecting the countertop for spices. When he found none, he peeked into the cupboard. He took out some clear plastic tubes that had labels on them. In no time he had broken the two eggs that had waited on the counter into the pan, mixed them up and flavoured them with some spices that sounded fitting. All with very little thought or awareness of his surroundings.
"What are you doing?" Mr Mazie's sharp inquiry cut him off from his work. Alejandro turned to see Mr Mazie and Tilly staring at him and the pan, the handle of which he had still not let go of.
"Cooking, I suppose," Alejandro responded and turned back to the pan. "It was burning."
"You almost burned my bacon!" Tilly yelped, before turning to her dad. "He saved it."
"Why would a vampire know how to cook?" Mr Mazie didn't want to let go of the topic. "What are you planning?"
"I have been babysitting a pan since I was capable of standing up and holding a spoon at once," Alejandro stated gruffly. Now that the crisis was over he realized just how irritable he felt after being woken up.
"Well, stop it," Mr Mazie demanded.
"Too late." Alejandro took the pan off the stove and poured the contents onto two plates that sat on the counter waiting. "Because I'm done."
Tilly seemed delighted to get to sample the food, but Mr Mazie seemed skeptical, as if suspecting Alejandro could have poisoned it, even though Tilly had been staring at him the whole time.
"This is so good!" Tilly announced. "Try it."
Mr Mazie finally gave in and seemed at the same time surprised, yet even grumpier. "Could be better," he grunted when pressed for a reaction by Tilly, "But it's okay."
Tilly saw this for what it was. "Why are you jealous?" she pressed.
"I'm not jealous," Mr Mazie argued grumpily. "I mean the spices are a bit old."
"They are," Alejandro confirmed. He studied the plastic tube of spice in his hand. "Some of these are years overdue."
New spices were sorely needed if Mr Mazie wanted to learn to get any good at cooking, which Tilly started to demand immediately. Apparently, it wasn't too uncommon for him to forget the food on the stove, forget to season it, or otherwise do a sloppy job of cooking. Tilly had been given some basic instructions at school, but she too seemed quite helpless in the kitchen, despite both possessing an appreciation for locally sourced ingredients and homemade food.
"Can you cook for us tomorrow too?" Tilly asked hopefully after they had finished cleaning up.
"I suppose I have no reason not to." Alenajdro smiled.
"Really?" Tilly was positively delighted. Then she sobered up a bit. "Will you go back to bed after that?"
Alejandro shook his head slowly and gazed out the living room window. "Since it seems I will get woken up early if I do decide to continue that, I feel it would not be worth it." He turned to Tilly and smiled softly. "Now that I have a warm place to stay for a month, I can nap just at night." Tilly regarded him with big, curious eyes. "Will you keep me company during the day?" he asked.
"Yes, yes yes!" Tilly made a little excited hop that made Alejandro smile even more. Tilly's face went thoughtful. "Since we are now besties-" she said this as if it was common knowledge, "-can I call you Ali for short?"
Alejandro let out a surprised laugh. "Sure you can," he responded, trying to calm himself down as Tilly made a very serious face at him.
'I like this place,' he thought to himself. 'Making friends is so easy here, apparently.'
Yet, even if the Bree situation had been handled to some satisfaction, Alejandro couldn't quite set it aside in his mind. Later in the same day, he stopped by Tilly's room.
"Hey, do you have a moment?" he asked while lurking at the door.
Tilly spun around in her desk chair to look at him. "Sure. What's up?"
"Did the Brees say why they came by?" Alejandro crossed the room to lean on her desk as he spoke.
"They were 'looking out for us', whatever that means."
Alejandro sighed. "I suppose no one you know might know more about them?"
"Nope. But I could google it, see what comes up." Tilly turned to the almost paper-thin slab of metal on her desk and started tapping away at it. She squinted at the screen. "Who makes a website just to post their family tree on?"
Alejandro turned to look at her screen. The page showed a thin line that separated and forked more and more the higher up it he looked. It must have had enough levels to go back at least a few centuries. "I don't know..." he started speaking, but a realization flashed into his mind. "It's their pedigree."
"What?"
"Good breeding. A weird obsession some bloodlines have. Shifters tend to take it more literally than human humans."
"Right. So it's an ad for suitors?"
"Basically. Does it say anything else?"
"This page is just this. Give me an hour, I'll look into it more."
It seemed that by "an hour" she must have meant a day because that is how long it took for him to hear her talk about it again. Or frankly even to see her again. The bowels of the internet had seemingly swallowed her completely until she finally emerged from her cave with dark shadows under her eyes.
Tilly had learned of an old cemetery just outside of town, in the middle of a forest, where a somewhat famous vampire had been buried after a staking carried out by the Brees. She became fascinated by the idea, and, that night, after making sure her father had fallen asleep, she drove Alejandro to the graveyard, seemingly unaware of how fishy it sounded. Not that he minded. Tilly's infectious curiosity coupled with his own interest in gaining knowledge made him gitty.
When they arrived, the place looked a mess; vines crept over the small mausoleum hiding in the corner, and the graves looked like they had not been visited in a century. The place was overgrown all over. The area was partially surrounded by a classic grey brick wall, with metal spikes at the top, punctuated by pillars. The whole graveyard must have been no bigger than an acre. Either that, or the forest had spread around the gravestones over the decades, which Alejandro granted as a possibility.
"Here it is!" Tilly announced, and leaned over a small gravestone almost completely obscured by long grass. She frowned. "I thought it would be bigger."
"Maybe they didn't want this to become a tourist destination," Alejandro laughed as he passed her by. He made his way to the small brick structure at the corner of the graveyard and studied the heavy metal doors. The plaque on it read something incomprehensible, but the only thing he could glean from it was the year 1692. He had no idea to what it could be referring to.
Then a curious crinkling noise caught his attention. It seemed to be coming from the right side of the structure. Alejandro leaned over to peek behind the corner, but found only bushes climbing over each other, eager to get a chance to expand into the graveyard. He squinted his eyes, and, step by careful step, crept forward. He would have missed the hole under the wall, had he not stepped in it and almost fallen over. He crouched to peer into the hole, and the crinkling stopped.
Inside was one of those big foxes, lurking in a hollow cavity under the wooden floorboards of the mausoleum. The creature had a clear plastic bag between its paws that it had been chewing on. Alejandro couldn't see the contents that well in the dark, but they appeared a bright shade of blue, like an unnaturally dyed candy.
"Hey there," Alejandro said softly and leaned over the hole. The dog looked at him with big black eyes and growled in warning. The reaction wasn't unexpected, but it still managed to startle him. "Apologies, have a good night," Alejandro said as he backed away slowly. He turned around to walk back to Tilly, and, from the corner of his eye, he saw the creature slip out of the cavity under the structure, and disappear into the bushes at the edge of the graveyard.
"Found anything interesting?" he shouted as he walked.
He forgot about the fox until he heard a rustle from the bushes. Curiously, he turned to look if it had returned. Instead of a big red dog, he got a face full of zombie. Alejandro instinctively shoved it away before it could bite him and, when it didn't relent, he sidestepped it and put his arms around it. "Calm down buddy," Alejandro said as he held the scrambling horror from behind, "We can make you better!"
The zombie gurgled, trying to chomp at his throat, with its head flopping side to side in an unnatural manner while turning almost completely around. Its neck appeared to be broken, and the constant crunching of bone that sounded every time it chopped empty air was nauseating, even to a vampire. The zombie managed somehow to tear itself apart enough to turn in his arms and sink its teeth into his shirt. Then the sharp slap of a thin and nimble branch bit him in the face. He looked up to see Tilly brandishing a sapling like an equestrian, with no understanding of horses brandishes a whip. She smacked the zombie again, this time mostly managing to avoid Alejandro's face. The zombie let go of Alejandro's shirt and turned its head around again, which made it flop upside down as the neck gave in. That didn't appear to make it any less dangerous though, as it then started clawing at Alejandro's shirt with its hands, while its legs tried to go for Tilly at the same time.
"Take it to the altar!" Tilly yelped, as the creature in Alejandro's arms lurched them both toward her.
"What? To burn it!?" Alejandro was panicking, "We don't need to!"
"What do you mean?!" Tilly shouted back. She had already gotten to the altar, which resembled a giant ashtray. "How do I set this on fire?" she cried, "Isn't it like the law to have matches here just for these situations?!"
"This place is at least a couple of centuries old! We didn't have health codes back then!" Alejandro retorted. The zombie had dragged him halfway to Tilly by this point. "Help me drag it to the mausoleum, if we lock it there we can come back and charm it later."
"I'm not playing with magic like that!" Tilly said sternly. "And also, that's illegal, and I don't know how!"
Before Alejnadro could persuade her, a sudden force shoved him from behind. It sent him tumbling over the zombie, and, a second later, the giant werefox had thrust him off the zombie. Alejandro dragged himself back along the ground and watched, wide-eyed, as the creature that had just been hiding in a hole now tore pieces of rotten flesh off the groaning zombie, like it hadn't eaten in days. The darkness made it appear even larger than before. Except, instead of eating the zombie, it was scattering the chunks of meat in a circle around them, far enough away so the zombie wouldn't grab any to eat and heal. Alehandro tore his eyes off them just long enough to see Tilly's back, as she fled to the car.
He scrambled to his feet, but a sharp pain in his shoulder prevented him from concentrating. He clutched the spot and cursed the poor dead fellow that had bitten him there. A human in his shoes would certainly get a life-threatening infection from this injury, but as a vampire, he would not be able to get sick. What he was worried about, however, was the fact that the injury would not heal before he got something to drink, and he wasn't in the mood to lose the function in his arm for a month.
When he recovered from the pain enough to look up again, Tilly was running toward them with a lighter in one hand and a jerrycan in the other. She spared one worried look at the shoulder he was clutching, then ran up to the podium and started pouring the gasoline onto it, holding the lighter between her teeth. Glancing between the werefox busily destroying the zombie's whole body and the girl with arson on her mind, he could do nothing but let out a desperate whine. Killing the creature a second time would be so cruel, even if the two alive people around him believed otherwise.
"Go collect its bits!" Tilly ordered him. Alejandro saw no other option but to obey, so he crept closer to the growling and huffing canine. One by one he started picking up fist-sized chunks of flesh and cradling them between his ripped shirt and aching arm. When he couldn't carry any more, he dashed to Tilly and deposited the meat into the giant ashtray. Tilly had finished emptying the jerrycan by that point, and they both ran back to get more pieces. Together, they collected the rest of the bits. As the zombie had been reduced now to a head and a length of the spine, the shifter dragged it to alter, while Tilly hauled the arms and legs and Alejandro carried more chunks of meat.
Then Tilly threw the lighter into the mess, and they all jumped back as a wall of fire exploded to life. They watched as the groaning zombie turned into ash in a hot flash. Alejandro noticed movement at the side of the altar and walked around it to find a rogue hand wiggling its way out of the flames. Tilly had tossed it too far and it had bounced to safety from the immediate blaze. He couldn't rescue it even if he wanted to, as the werebeast jumped between him and it. It growled and stared at him menacingly. Alejandro walked back several steps, and the creature followed. Tilly had fetched a stick and used it to flip the hand back into the fire.
"I wasn't going to touch it," Alejandro told the fox. It looked at him with suspicion, but stopped growling and baring its teeth, at least. Then it let out a loud bark, or a roar, or a mix of the two; a road bark. The sound echoed through the graveyard, and reminded Alejandro of something. "Are you a weremain?" he asked the beast. It didn't respond – just eyed him carefully.
"Holy shit!" Came a shout from behind it. Tilly was standing still next to the altar, and against the backlight of the fire, she looked a little intimidating. "You are a Bree... Don't hurt him!" she demanded. The weremain looked at her over its shoulder and gave a huff of indifference. Tilly didn't seem to trust that answer, as she ran between it and Alejandro, making herself into a human shield once more. The creature tilted its head and eyed him over her shoulder.
"Calm down," Alejandro moaned in frustration. His discomfort made the shifter visibly less agitated. It eyed the pair of them as Tilly forced her back against Alejandro, and he tried to get her off him, all the while she was fixated on the weremain. It took him a moment to realize she was trying to shove him toward the car. He relented and turned around, at which point Tilly grabbed him by the arm and dragged him the rest of the way. The shifter was left behind with its head tilting from side to side and tail tentatively wagging in curiosity.
Only once they were speeding up the road did Tilly explain herself, and she let it out like a landslide. "Sorry about that. I wasn't sure if he was going to attack you or not. Do you think he was sober?"
"Uh," Alejandro tried to keep up with her pace. "I think so-"
"I think that was Fetcher Bree," Tilly continued to explain. "He is the weird one, everyone always warns me not to go close to him. Well, they say not to go close to any Bree, but especially him. I heard he is always drunk in public, and that, one time, he bit someone really badly. I think he was on drugs or something. We never figured it out, though." She stopped to take a breath.
"I see," Alejandro mused. The weremain had been overly aggressive about the hand, but not unreasonably so, considering the situation. He figured Tilly was still panicking and her mind must still have been overactive. He considered voicing the thought for a moment, but the stress radiating off her like a deafening heartbeat coaxed him to keep it to himself. Atleast for the time being.