Misty Rose: Nature
Chapter 11
The Monday after the party, we still hadn’t really talked about it. I could tell Kaitlyn was working her way through some stuff, but she didn’t bring it up. Or maybe I was just… thinking that was what was happening with her because that’s what was happening with me. Neither of us really said much of anything. Not in a tense or awkward or whatever way. More like we both had a lot to think about and didn’t really have much to talk about. But I did notice that Kaitlyn didn’t seem to want get too far away from me. Well, not like she could in our tiny little apartment, but you get what I mean. She didn’t sleep in the closet with me again, but… I found little changes. Like my pillow from my bed got put under my head, or like she put another blanket over me even though I didn’t need it. Little things. I’m also pretty sure she called in sick from work on Monday because she was still in her pajamas when I woke up that night. I didn’t say anything, though. I was going to give her space to think if she needed it.
The first thing Kaitlyn said wasn’t quite what I expected.
“Oh, I forgot,” she said. “You got mail yesterday.”
“Um…” I said. “You mean durin’ the day today?”
“Nope. This turned up on Sunday.” Kaitlyn handed me… well, a pamphlet. Looked like someone had it printed at Kinko’s or something because it had that sort of not-quite-perfect copy look, and wasn’t stapled very well, either. What it actually said, though, well… I didn’t get past the first page before I was banging my head on the counter. Vampires…
“You okay?” Kaitlyn asked.
“Did you read this?”
“Yeah. It’s about vampires, isn’t it?”
“Crazy ones.”
You probably want to know what it was. Well… you know those pamphlets that some of the more… preachy Christians print up and stuff in mailboxes on Sundays? Think of that. Then make it about four hundred times more stupid and crazy and have it talk about someone called Saint Januarius. Who I’d never heard of, but the internet said he was some guy whose old dried out blood turned liquid like three times a year. Yeah. Leave it to vampires to focus on magic blood. I didn’t even believe in all that shit and it was still incredibly dumb. The stupid little pamphlet tried real hard to pretend it wasn’t about vampires, but… well, only the most batshit insane human religions actually talk about how no, they don’t actually require believers to go out and murder people who don’t believe. Only it called vampires “The Thirsty” because I guess it was trying to not be that obvious and whoever wrote it didn’t know shit about internet memes. But “thirsty” was still a good way to describe a lot of vampires. It also made it kind of obvious it wasn’t the only vampire religion because it also talked about what to do about vampires who believed, but didn’t worship that Januarius person.
Whatever fuckwit left it just stuffed it in the mail slot where any human could find it. And one did. My roommate. I’m just going to say that I wasn’t feeling any urges to convert. At all. Not even after I went through all ten pages of the stupid thing. The basic idea of it seemed to be that some old bishop in ancient Rome died, only he really became a vampire, and that some of his blood that someone put in a jar turned liquid again to indicate… I don’t know, that he was blessed by God or something. Then he went around telling vampires that they were supposed to act like vampires because humans were sinful and needed to be punished. Pretty convenient way to pretend like what vampires do is okay, since there was a shitload of “God said to do it” and not a lot of feeling bad about hurting people. I suppose if you didn’t know vampires were real, maybe the thing wouldn’t make someone think they are. They’d probably think it was some kind of terrorist cult instead, but I guess that was okay because it wouldn’t be a vampire cult. I wasn’t buying it. I also thought maybe some of the people who cared about the actual saint might get mad about this stupid cult, but I don’t think they ever found out.
But in some ways, it was kind of nice. Talking shit about crazy religious vampires gave me and Kaitlyn something to talk about that wasn’t… the party. We spent, I don’t know, half an hour more coming up with stupid things that these nuts might believe, like that Dracula was a Mormon because he had more than one Bride of Dracula. We were trying to somehow mix in the whole Zombie Jesus thing when the doorbell rang. Me and Kaitlyn looked at each other, then she grinned.
“Hide!” she said. “Vampire Mormons!”
I grinned back, but I thought the person at my door was probably something I should be serious about. “Did you invite someone over?” I asked. Had to check.
“Not me.”
“Alright. I should probably get the door then.” The bell rang again, and Kaitlyn and I looked at each other. Humans didn’t usually go ringing doorbells this late at night, and some ding dong dash jerk wouldn’t ring twice. I got up and went to the door, took a deep breath, and opened it.
The ringer wasn’t human. I could tell right away because of whatever the hell vampire sense I had for that. She looked human… shorter than me but wearing heels, pinstripe skirt suit. She had very pale skin, really nice auburn hair, and gray eyes. Like actual gray, not just pale blue. Extremely pretty if a bit on the skinny side. And she was a vampire, and not one of the more human ones. Not one of the less human ones, but still. I thought maybe I’d seen her somewhere, like at the vampire social.
“Are you Misty Rose?” she asked. She seemed… cold, I guess.
“That’s me,” I said. “Who’re you?”
“I haven’t decided if you need to know that,” she said.
I narrowed my eyes. “Well, if you’re gonna be a bitch about it…”
“I don’t have to tolerate this from a neonate.”
No idea what that meant, but I thought maybe I shouldn’t piss off other vampires, you know? “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just really late and… well, you’re a…”
“Who’s that?” she interrupted, looking past me at Kaitlyn.
“Kaitlyn. Best friend. Roommate.”
“Does she know about us?” Meaning vampires, I guess. Not like there was a lot of other things me and the lady shared besides being female, and I figured Kaitlyn probably knew about that.
I felt like I had to protect Kaitlyn, so I tried to lie about it. “No.”
It wasn’t like the lady’s expression changed, but I somehow got the feeling that she believed my lie as much as Kaitlyn ever did. “This isn’t for her to hear. Come with me.”
I stared at her, then looked down at my bathrobe. “Right now?”
“Is there a problem?”
“Can I get dressed first?”
The lady stared at me a moment. “Five minutes,” she said, folding her arms.
I blinked at her, then looked at Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn did not look happy, but wasn’t saying anything, maybe because the lady was the first vampire Kaitlyn had seen besides me, and the lady was kind of scary, even to me. Like the sort of person that would shoot you because you were in the way.
“Um…” I looked at the lady. “Are you just gonna… stand in the door like that?” Yeah, I can be kind of prudish sometimes, but I didn’t really want to change with the door open. Didn’t seem to matter, though, because the lady just went from staring at me to staring at her watch. Expensive and sort of old-fashioned, and now that I was thinking about it, so was she. Something about her was… I don’t know, but I was thinking of her as lady, not woman. She just seemed like a lady, you know? Classy. But still very cold, and those two things can absolutely show up together.
“Right. Okay,” I said. I picked up a shirt and some pants and shoes and went into the bathroom to get changed. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this, but I was getting the feeling that I didn’t really have a choice. Most other vampires could probably make me do whatever they wanted. Not the best thought to have, you know? I finished getting dressed and went back out. Only thing that’d changed was that the lady was now tapping her foot while staring at her watch.
“Um… Kaitlyn?” I said, looking at her. “I guess… I’m goin’ out. With the… kind of scary lady who won’t tell me her name. Um… I’ll be back… later. Don’t wait up, okay?”
“You going to be okay?” Kaitlyn asked. She looked worried.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I think.”
“You have your keys and phone?” Kaitlyn asked.
I looked around, then grabbed both from my dresser. “Now I do.”
“Okay,” Kaitlyn said. “Take care.”
“You too. Bye.” As I headed towards the door, the scary lady turned on her heel and started walking away. I followed her, shutting the door behind me. I heard Kaitlyn closing all the locks pretty much immediately after the door closed. The scary lady was walking away from the little parking lot for my building and down the street. I hurried to catch up.
“Okay, so…” I said. The scary lady held up a hand.
“Not here,” she said. “The night has ears.”
“Oh, right,” I said and shut up. She didn’t want to risk anyone hearing us. But were we just going to keep walking? She wasn’t really wearing the kind of shoes you’d want to wear for walking but… that didn’t always seem to matter for vampires. But as it turned out, she was leading us towards a big black old fashioned limo parked down the street. You know, one of those ones that sort of looks like a couple of boxes on wheels and has a spare tire on the side? It was parked right in front of a fire hydrant, actually, but that was the only place a car that size could have parked on my street that time of night, and I was getting the feeling that the lady didn’t give a fuck about parking tickets. As we got close, a guy in a suit got out of the driver’s seat, came around the car, and opened the back door for us. I was definitely feeling like this was all out of some movie, you know? The scary lady got in first and moved to sit with her back to where the driver was. I got in and sat down facing her. The driver shut the door, then got back into the front of the limo. The scary lady kept staring at me the whole time. She knocked twice on the window behind her, and the driver started the car and we pulled out into the street.
I’m giving this much detail because it’s all why I started getting Godfather vibes off the whole thing at this point, you know? She didn’t have me sitting between two thugs in suits, but her suit and the car any everything was making me think I was maybe going to wind up sleeping with the fishes. The lady didn’t look Italian, but that didn’t really matter. I felt like I was going to ask her if she was going to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse, but I decided to just keep my damn mouth shut this time. I got the feeling the scary lady wouldn’t like the joke. She just looked at me for a moment.
“Would it speed this along if I told you Pops asked me to speak to you?” she finally said.
Oh. Okay. She knew Pops. He said he’d either talk to me himself or ask one of his friends to do it, but the scary lady didn’t seem like she was the sort to be friends with Pops.
“Um…” I said.
“Pops told me you’re a hugger,” the scary lady said. “I would prefer you refrain from doing so in my case. Our relationship is entirely business.”
I relaxed a little. Yeah, that was something that Pops would have known and not likely anyone else. So the scary lady was a friend of Pops. I wasn’t in any danger. Well, long as I didn’t piss her off.
“I can do that,” I said.
“Good,” the scary lady frowned. “First, your roommate. Kaitlyn, was it? How much does she know about us? It may be important.”
“Um,” I said. I still felt like I needed to protect Kaitlyn, even if the scary lady was a friend of Pops. “She… doesn’t really know anythin’. Like I said.”
“You’re a terrible liar,” the scary lady said. “And you’re wasting my time.”
“Yeah, she says that too,” I sighed. “Okay. Kaitlyn knows what I know. Which isn’t much.”
The scary lady nodded. “You may want to keep it that way. Regardless, I wouldn’t speak of Kaitlyn to other vampires. Some can be excessive about keeping humans ignorant.”
“Why?”
“I’ll get to that,” the scary lady said. “Pops asked me to tell you about our world. There’s a great deal of information to go over, much of which I’ll have to explain, and we don’t have a lot of time before dawn. Nor do I have the luxury of spending more than one night on this for the foreseeable future. I’m a very busy woman. You may ask questions as you have them, but be aware that we’re on the clock, so try to keep any questions brief and to the point.”
I nodded. “I’ll shut up and let you talk, then.”
I’m not going to go over all of what she said here, because she spent four hours talking. At a time of year where the nights were like six hours long. That’s just way too much to go over unless I want to spend like six hours on just that because I’m not as… I dunno, exact as the scary lady. So I’ll just explain stuff as it comes up because a lot of it will. But she did put up with my questions about some things, and there’s maybe some stuff I should actually talk about right now.
First off, the keeping humans ignorant thing was… well, what sword guy said about not letting humans know about us. Which made sense. Humans had gasoline and flamethrowers and shit, and vampires burn easy. Or the humans could just drag us out into the sun, you know? And all those movies and whatever aren’t usually about the vampire winning, are they? Scary lady said a vampire could probably deal with one or two humans, but a dozen that knew how to kill us, no. So no showing humans we exist. Don’t do stuff humans can’t do in front of humans. Don’t tell them about us. Of course, I already broke that one, but I trusted Kaitlyn. She didn’t talk about stuff I asked her not to, at least not to other people. And I got to be honest, I didn’t mind keeping being a vampire secret. It wasn’t like I liked being a vampire, so I didn’t feel like I was having to hide something good.
Another not so bad thing was that it turns out vampires can get… superpowers, I guess. The scary lady called them a bunch of different names I didn’t remember, and said they… what kind of vampire you are is important. Like it helps you learn some superpowers easier than others. But everything I told her about was, well… normal vampire stuff. So I still didn’t know what kind of vampire I was because I guess what superpowers I might have would help figure that out. Or something like that.
Bloodline. Right. That’s what kind of vampire you are. It’s like a family tree. Sort of.
Healing from being shot or stabbed or whatever, that was just normal for vampires. Big thing with that was that fire and sunlight and other really bad stuff was hard to heal, and that… I’d have to use up blood to heal at all. I mean, vampires just kind of used blood just to do anything, and if I didn’t have any I’d end up in some kind of vampire coma. Same if I got staked. But that meant I’d probably have to go looking for blood more if I wanted to heal or make myself stronger or whatever. And for… well, turns out vampires could also make themselves warm and make their heart beat and eat food. But what’d happen if I ate food was just too disgusting to be worth doing, and most of the reasons she told me for making myself seem alive were about tricking humans.
The main thing seemed to be that the world I was in now was more fucked up than I realized. I mean… think about it. There actually had to be rules against killing people. Well, okay, humans have that rule too, but vampires were fucking casual about it. Lot of vampires see humans like they’re just… food. Don’t care about who they hurt or anything. And there’s worse. Lots worse. The shit that I had to deal with was pretty fucking tame compared to some of what the scary lady talked about. Only good thing about it was that it kind of seemed like if I stayed… harmless and quiet and… well, the kind of person that the other vampires didn’t think wasn’t worth noticing, that maybe… the really nasty shit wouldn’t be something I’d have to deal with. I mean, if I survived long enough, I’d probably have to deal with it at some point, but maybe I wouldn’t until I was… stronger.
But… the thing that ended up bugging me the most wasn’t even anything important. It was actually kind of stupid. So, when a vampire sleeps for the day, it’s like their body resets to what it was like when they died. They lose tattoos, scars, grow back hair, that kind of thing, if they happened after they died, anyway. And vampires don’t get fat, or get more muscle when they get stronger or anything like that. Their bodies stay the same as when they died. Mostly. Scary lady said there were ways to change some things, but didn’t say how. Anyway, while she was talking about that, I was sitting there thinking it’s good I… shaved everything for the party. You know? Because otherwise I’d have to shave off all the hair I didn’t want every night, and that was a pain in the ass when I was alive. Women aren’t supposed to be hairy, and dealing with that took up a lot of time. Pretty shallow thing to think about, right? Well, that wasn’t even the stupid thing, because right after that, it hit me that I’m going to be carrying the extra weight I couldn’t get rid of before the party forever. Yeah. I’m a bloodsucking corpse, and there’s a part of me freaking out because I won’t have a bikini body for the rest of time. Because…
Okay, confession time. Again. I actually really care about my looks. It’s fucking shallow. I know it’s shallow. But I still would get all obsessed about my body, or my face, or my hair, or whatever because… they were all I had. All that shit about how if you got talent, you can get out of being poor? Doesn’t mean shit if you don’t got talent. And I didn’t. I didn’t get good grades. Wasn’t good at any sports. Not musical, average dancer at best. My parents did what they could to find something I could do, but… nothing. It was like I had no talent for anything. And when your family’s poor, and you got no talent for anything special, the only thing you got to pull yourself out of being poor is marrying some guy that’s got just a bit more than you do. Or a lot more, but let’s be honest here, that kind of poor to rich marriage shit only happens in fiction. In real life, if you’re poor, you got to have something that’ll give you a ticket out, or you’ll be fucking poor your whole life. And it wasn’t just for me. I wanted to bring my parents out, too. But there wasn’t shit I could do. The only thing people who weren’t close to me cared about was my looks. I was part of the popular crowd because of my looks. Wasn’t ever going to be a model, but I could at least… get some kind of better paying job where most of what I had to do was smile and be pretty. Maybe marry someone a bit richer than me, end up with enough that I could send home some money to help out my parents, you know? Sorry if I’m shitting on anyone’s parade here, but when you’re born blue collar poor that’s just how the world fucking is. My looks were what I had, so I obsessed about them. End of story. And I was sitting there being told that the whole fucking world was probably going to try to kill me, and what I was thinking about is that I’m going to spend the rest of however long I survive with an ass just a little bigger than I wanted. Nice fucking priorities, right?
I didn’t tell the scary lady. I hadn’t even told Kaitlyn, even though sometimes she’d get on my case about being worried about how I looked. She didn’t know why. And I’d see stuff on the internet, lot of stuff about society’s double standards and shit, and I’d say yeah, fuck that, but inside I’d still feel like I had to be pretty and everything if I ever wanted to not be poor. Wasn’t ever about looking good for myself, and… you know what? I’m just going to stop going on about this. Didn’t really matter because now that I was a vampire, my looks just made me a target or made it easier to get what I wanted from people, like blood. Even from other vampires. Scary lady sort of made it sound like vampires weren’t as sexist as humans, but… how woke could a bunch of people who got turned a hundred years ago or more really be? Sounded like vampires got their brains stuck at whatever point they got turned into vampires, and most of the power was held by really fucking old vampires. And since sex wasn’t a thing for vampires, I couldn’t use the hint of maybe getting to fuck the pretty girl, and I didn’t have anything else to rely on. Of course, it still worked on humans, so I could still use my looks for blood. But it was pretty fucking clear I was otherwise fucked. Not literally, of course. Vampires wouldn’t want that from me. They’d want stuff that was much worse, and had all kinds of nasty ways to get it.
I learned a lot during that ride, and most of it was pretty shitty. Can’t say I was in a good mood when the scary lady dropped me off at my apartment again. Seemed like my life as a vampire was going to be bloody, nasty, and short. I really got why some new vampires decided to let the sun end it all for them. Can’t say I wasn’t kind of feeling a little that way myself. But the scary lady said I should take some time to think about all of it before I did anything, and if there was anything I was good at, it was sitting on my ass and not doing anything.
The lights were still on when I got back, so I thought Kaitlyn had waited up. Turned out she tried, but ended up falling asleep anyway. She was sitting on her bed like she’d dozed off while looking at her phone. It was kind of cute, but… I just really wasn’t in the mood to deal with her. So I sort of gently pushed her into a position that meant she wouldn’t wake up with a sore neck, wrapped a blanket around her, and went and curled up in my closet. Yeah, depressing way to end this part of the journal, but… it was actually kind of a relief when the sun came up, because I could spend the day dead and not have to think about anything. Right about then, not having to think about anything was pretty much exactly what I wanted. Sometimes there isn’t shit you can do.
