Misty Rose: Nature
Chapter 12
Of course, the problem with being dead all day is that you don’t really get a chance to work anything out. I woke up with pretty much the same issues I had at dawn. I even did the thing where when I woke up, I sort of rolled over and tried to go back to sleep instead of getting up so I could put off dealing with things for a little longer. Didn’t work, and it’s kind of hard to roll over when you’re hunched up in the back corner of a closet. After a few minutes I gave up and got up.
Kaitlyn was in the kitchen space making… the sort of thing you make for dinner when you don’t got a lot of food handy. Spaghetti with ketchup sauce and a lot of spices, boil the water in the microwave, you get the idea. I let her do her thing and went to lay down on my bed. Kaitlyn looked over at me, but didn’t say anything. Neither did I. Didn’t really feel like talking.
Eventually she came over and sat down on her own bed with a bowl full of her cheap-ass spaghetti and sat blowing on her food to cool it down. “You went out without your face on last night,” she said eventually, then started eating.
She was right. With scary lady standing in the doorway, I didn’t even think about makeup. Didn’t think about it at all until Kaitlyn mentioned it. Might have considered it a good thing, step towards untangling that knot in my brain except I think I was just too scared of scary lady to feel like I had to do my makeup before I went out. Fear doesn’t really count.
“She ever tell you her name?” Kaitlyn asked.
I shook my head.
“She tell you anything useful?”
“Yeah,” I said and sighed.
“I can listen,” Kaitlyn said. “If you wanna talk.”
I thought about that. Kaitlyn needed to know some stuff because it affected her. Other stuff, not so much. And some of it I didn’t even want to think about. “Okay,” I said. “Some stuff I’m… not gonna get into. Prob’ly. Most of it is pretty shitty. Some of it is only kinda shitty. And there’s a few things that aren’t so bad ‘cept they’re only good ’cause they’re a silver linin’ of somethin’ shitty. Whatcha wanna hear first?”
Kaitlyn shrugged. “You pick.”
I sighed. Figured. “Alright, well… I guess first I gotta tell you that… y’know how sword guy got on my case about not ever tellin’ humans about vampires?”
“Yeah.”
“Vampires try to hide from humans, and they’re fuckin’ serious about it. You gotta promise me you’re never gonna tell anyone what I tell you if I’m gonna tell you anythin’ else. ’Cause if you do, it’s pretty likely that they’ll kill both of us… and anyone you tell. Get the idea?”
“That’s gonna suck for you,” Kaitlyn said. “I know how much you like doin’ stuff in public.”
“Ugh, no, not like that,” I rolled my eyes. “This is serious, Kaitlyn. I gotta get your promise ‘cause… it sounds like some vampires’ll know if I’m lyin’ about you promisin’ not to tell anyone. Prob’ly shouldn’t say anythin’ about you at all. And they’d prob’ly think I was bein’ stupid. Vampires don’t have a lotta respect for human friendships and stuff.”
“They want a contract signed in my blood?” Kaitlyn still didn’t sound angry. Just quiet.
“Don’t think we hafta go that far.”
Kaitlyn scooted over to the side of her bed and leaned over so she could look me right in the eyes. “I swear I will never tell anyone about you, vampires in general, or anything I learn about actual, real vampires, ever.” Then she grinned. “Even unto death I will keep my damn mouth shut.”
I sort of grinned back. “Good enough for me,” I said. “And I think that last bit would prob’ly impress a couple vampires. Maybe. But it’s good to know.”
Kaitlyn sat back and went back to her spaghetti. “What else?”
“Well, the scary lady thinks my vampire daddy might be even more fucked up than most vampires,” I said. “Which is all kindsa awesome.”
“Really? How?”
“Okay,” I sighed. This was one of the more complicated parts, and the scary lady had to go over it a few times before I got it. “So, Pops and his friends have… sorta convinced the Baron to try an experiment. Baron Whathisname is kind of an asshole, but he’s… I dunno, a scientist? Anyway, they got him to agree to tryin’ an experiment where he makes the vampires in the city treat humans better than vampires usually treat humans. I mean… the vampires still hunt ’em for blood, but… no killin’ humans, and no usin’ ’em like toys.”
“They do that?” Kaitlyn said.
“Yeah. And it’s not fun for the humans. Some of the shit the scary lady talked about that the religious vampires do to humans is pretty fucked up. Sacrifice is prob’ly the nicest thing.”
“Jesus,” Kaitlyn said.
“Sorta yes, sorta not really. Januarius, like in that stupid…” I looked around. “Where’d you put that stupid pamphlet thing you found on Sunday?”
“Stuck it up on the fridge,” Kaitlyn shrugged.
“Well, I’m not convertin’ to what they believe for sure,” I said. “And I’m not joinin’ the other group. Vampire witches, worship nasty, horrible old gods and goddesses.”
“Oh, like Wiccans,” Kaitlyn said. “I dated a couple of those.”
“Yeah, and I said it was a bad idea,” I said.
“No, you said it was a bad idea to date a guy on the rebound, then leave him for his ex.”
“Even if she was cuter. They were both messed up.”
“Yup. But not ’cause they were Wiccans.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, vampire blood witches aren’t Wiccans. They’re psychos.”
“Okay,” Kaitlyn said. “So vampires fuck up even that kinda stuff. I gotcha.”
“Yeah, vampires’re…” I sighed. “Kaitlyn, you gotta understand. There’s no good guys, okay? Even the best vampires gotta drink blood, so they gotta hurt people. Best we can do is hurt as few people as possible… or only hurt bad people. Like the guys I go after.”
“Okay, but there’s Pops,” Kaitlyn said. “And you. You saved me from those assholes.”
“Pops is prob’ly one of the best vampires in the world,” I said. “And he still drinks blood like the rest of us. And me… I try but… okay, that’s somethin’ else I gotta tell you.”
Kaitlyn raised her eyebrows at me, then set her empty bowl aside.
“I know what happened at the party now,” I said. “And it’s not a good thing.”
“Okay…”
“I’ve got this… thing inside me,” I said. Kaitlyn opened her mouth and I went on quickly. “Not like a parasite or whatever. It’s… I dunno, part of my mind or somethin’ ’cause of what kinda vampire I am. I was thinkin’ of it like an animal ’cause that’s pretty much what it wants. Feed, kill, that kinda thing, and it… well, drives us crazy. Makes us freak out sometimes, like around fire, or if we get really fuckin’ pissed off or really hungry. Makes us do really horrible things. Like…”
“Like?”
I swallowed. “Well… remember the last guy I beat up? He didn’t try to attack me. I sorta remember him… scared and beggin’ me for mercy or somethin’. But I still… hurt him. Bad. That was the Beast. The whole thing was my Beast takin’ over and… hurtin’ a bunch of people.”
Kaitlyn looked at me for a moment. “That guy you’re so worried about hurting when he was begging you for mercy was holding down one of my arms.”
“Yeah, but…”
“So you freaked out,” Kaitlyn interrupted me. “You saved me. You didn’t kill any of them even though they probably deserved it. This wasn’t the first time they’d grabbed some girl at a party and gang raped her. I could tell. You didn’t do anything permanent to them, either. Nothing major anyway, like cutting off fingers or arms or something. You stopped when they were all down. You didn’t come after me, either. And now…” Kaitlyn sighed, rolling her eyes. “Now you’re sitting here trying to find reasons to hate yourself for saving me from those assholes. Okay. Fine. If you gotta hate yourself, do it. But the way I see it, you saved me. And we just hafta not piss you off like that anymore.”
I just stared at Kaitlyn. She didn’t know about how some part of me felt like she was property for me to… do whatever I wanted with, even if she didn’t want to do it. And I couldn’t tell her. Didn’t want to ruin her trust. So… yeah, I’d just have to not let me get pissed off like that again. And I’d have to… sit on that part of me until it shut up about Kaitlyn. It wasn’t bugging me right then, which was good, probably because I wasn’t thirsty. It wasn’t the best choice, but… we’d figured out something that could stop me. So that’d have to do for the moment, and I’d need to keep myself fed. Otherwise… I didn’t want to think about what being thirsty might make me do to Kaitlyn.
“Okay,” I said. “But, um… keep the pepper spray on you, okay? Just in case.”
“It’ll dye your face green again.”
“Don’t care. Rather look stupid than do somethin’ nasty.”
“Gotcha.”
I sighed. I didn’t think Kaitlyn really got why I was worried, but… like I said, I couldn’t tell her about the last thing I was feeling that night. I’d have to at some point, but… not right then.
“Alright,” I said. “Um… I was talkin’ about somethin’ else before that came up.”
“You were talking about the Baron,” Kaitlyn said, then added: “Blondie.”
“Ha ha, very funny,” I said. “Um… so the scary lady told me ‘bout the experiment, right? Only there’re some vampires that aren’t happy. Like the religious ones. So there’s some vampires that’re tryin’ to fuck up the experiment. Make the Baron decide bein’ gentler with humans is a bad idea.”
“And this has to do with you why?” Kaitlyn asked.
“Scary lady thinks my vampire daddy made me a vampire so…” I scowled. “So he could abandon me and I’d fuck things up really bad and make a giant mess.”
Kaitlyn stared at me. “You’re fucking with me, right?”
“Nope. Scary lady thinks the idea was to pick some clueless mortal and turn ’em into a vampire, then let ’em loose on the city. They’d prob’ly fuck up, kill some humans, get the cops mixed up in vampire business, and cause a big ol’ breach of trust. Or somethin’ like that. It’s happened before. I was s’posed to last a day or two at most. Cause some damage and die before I could tell anyone I’d been turned and abandoned. But that’s not what happened.”
“Yeah,” Kaitlyn grinned at me. “You managed to fuck up fucking things up. Congrats.”
“Kaitlyn!” I said, glarin’ at her. “I’m bein’ serious here.”
“So am I.” Kaitlyn slurped some of her spaghetti to prove how serious she was.
“Ugh. Anyway, that’s not what happened ’cause I ended up goin’ to the vampire social and meetin’ Pops instead of seein’ the dead kid, freakin’ out and… losin’ control of myself ’cause no one’d taught me about bein’ a vampire. Kill a few innocent people, get mowed down by a buncha trigger happy cops, have the cops or a hospital or both see I’m not human, blah blah blah. The Baron sees bein’ nice to humans just means there’s a giant mess, he goes back to lettin’ the vampires act how they were before. And humans start gettin’ killed by vampires all over the place again.”
Kaitlyn nodded. “Good thing you met Pops, then.”
“Yeah,” I said. “’Cept… scary lady said me goin’ to the vampire social doesn’t make sense for that plan, and the paper with the address led me there, so the paper doesn’t make sense. Scary lady also said that the whole plan wasn’t just fucked up, but it was demented, too. Like… the sorta thing a vampire that was goin’ crazy would come up with. Too much shit that might not work out, and the whole idea of a new vampire flippin’ out doesn’t exactly prove that bein’ nice to humans is a bad idea, y’know? So scary lady said it seemed like the kinda plan that a vampire too crazy to think straight would come up with. Unless…”
“Unless?”
“Unless I was s’posed to be decoy for somethin’ else.”
Kaitlyn shook her head. “Not sure I’m getting all this.”
“Me either,” I said. “Gave me a headache, actually.”
“Thinking gives you a headache, blondie.”
“Kaitlyn, please.”
She grinned at me. “Okay, so your vampire daddy’s a shithead. Anything else?”
“Lots,” I said. “But that’s the stuff I felt like you needed to know, mostly.”
“Ooh, mysterious,” Kaitlyn said, rolling her eyes. She put her empty bowl down, then turned over to lie on her stomach, facing me.
“It’s not like that. I’m still tryin’ to sort through a lot of it myself.”
“Like what? Maybe I can help.”
“Well, like…” I thought. What’d be safe to tell Kaitlyn about? There probably wasn’t much. The stuff that wouldn’t scare her would make her sick, and the stuff that wouldn’t do either would… I don’t know, maybe sound better than it was because it all came with being a vampire, which sucked. Well, okay, maybe I could tell her about blood. She already knew about some of that. “Like blood.”
“Vampires need blood,” Kaitlyn shrugged. “That’s nothing special.”
“More like… what we can use blood for. Not just for livin’ and… healin’ ourselves. You know about that. We can also use blood to… use vampire superpowers, I guess.”
“Well, that’s cool,” Kaitlyn said, totally missing the point like I expected. “What kinda superpowers do you have? The healing thing?”
“None,” I said flatly. “Everythin’ I can do is normal vampire stuff. I got no special vampire superpowers at all. Least not any that I know of, or that scary lady could tell.”
Kaitlyn looked disappointed. “That sucks.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can heal, make myself stronger, I don’t get hurt easy, and I don’t bleed. But sunlight and fire and havin’ my head cut off kill me, and a stake through the heart puts me in a coma. Same happens if I don’t have any blood ‘cept I freak out and then go into a coma. I’d make a pretty shitty superhero, y’know? More problems than powers.”
“There’s gotta be something else,” Kaitlyn said.
“Nope.” I said. “Um, or… well, there’s somethin’ but it’s not really a power. It’s more like… I can use blood to… seem like I’m not dead. For a little while, anyway.”
“What?”
“I can…” I stopped. Maybe I should just show her. “Okay, c’mere. Let me see your hand.”
Kaitlyn moved over onto my bed next to me and held out her hand. I took it and put it on my neck. “See? No heartbeat?” She moved her hand around on my neck a little.
Kaitlyn nodded. “Yep. Cold dead girl.”
I ignored that and closed my eyes. The scary lady made me practice what I was going to show Kaitlyn until I got it right. Said it’d be useful for a few reasons I liked, and one that I didn’t. But I figured this was safe enough to show Kaitlyn, and she might like it, at least a little. I’d tried meditating a few times, and I sucked at that too, but that might also have been because the one teaching me was the Wiccan guy Kaitlyn dated, who was totally unable to be faithful to any girl and was using the lessons to try to fuck me while he was still dating Kaitlyn. Anyway, the scary lady said this was something that vampires could do naturally, so maybe that helped make it easier. I thought about my blood, and sort of… imagined it flowing into my heart and making it start beating, then flowing from there to the rest of me. I got to be honest, it felt really weird. Can’t really describe it, but… the first time my heart beat was always kind of painful, sort of a wrenching feeling in my chest, and for the first second after that I really felt how cold a room temperature body was compared to how warm a living human was. But the end result of going through all that was that I could make my heart beat and my body warm. At least for a little while. It felt… really good. But like everything else vampires did, it meant I’d use up blood every time I did it, so I’d need to hurt more humans. That part sucked.
I heard Kaitlyn gasp and opened my eyes. She still had her hand on my neck, and put her other hand on my face. “Wow,” she said. “It’s… like you’re alive again.”
“Uh huh,” I said. “But it doesn’t last all that long and… I gotta use up my blood to do this. Hey!” That last bit was because Kaitlyn had started running her hands over my body, and some places she was putting them were less appropriate than others.
“That’s cool,” she said. “What else can you do with this?”
“Well…” I said. “I’m warm, my heart beats, I breathe like a human… um, still don’t get tired, though. I can… sorta eat if I really want to deal with throwing it all up when this wears off, and scary lady said that I can have se…” I shut my mouth on that last one. That was the one I wasn’t so happy about because of why the scary lady said it was probably going to be important.
Of course, Kaitlyn still figured it out. “Sex?” she said. “This means you can have sex? Can’t you have sex anyway? You’re female. Do vampires not have sex parts?” She seemed way too interested in the idea, especially after I’d just had to fend off her grabby hands.
“We do,” I said. “But they don’t work. Guys can’t get it up, and girls… well, stuff just doesn’t work like it’s supposed to anymore. And we’re cold, and a partner will prob’ly notice that. And we won’t enjoy it, especially compared to drinkin’ blood.” It was really awkward to talk about.
Kaitlyn looked at my face and actually squealed. “You’re blushing! Ohmygawd, Misty, you’re actually blushing about this!” And yeah, my face did feel warmer now that she said that. So I guess starting my heart up made me able to blush, too, which was awesome.
“Yeah, well…” I looked away. “I’d blush before too, remember?”
“Ohmygawd, that’s so cute!” Kaitlyn grinned. “Hey, does that mean you can also feel…” Her hands were moving towards my chest. I grabbed her wrists before this got any more awkward.
“Kaitlyn! Don’t feel up the vampire chick!”
“Aww…” Kaitlyn pouted at me.
“I’m tryin’ to be serious here,” I said. “And this isn’t all good. It costs blood to do this, remember? So I can’t do it all the time, and it stops when I stop usin’ blood.”
Kaitlyn frowned at me. “How much blood?”
“I dunno. Enough to start feelin’ thirsty again until I stop. Then I go back to bein’ dead and cold.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad. What’s the problem? Can you get pregnant?”
“No. God, no.”
“What about diseases?”
“Scary lady said vampires can carry stuff, but don’t usually feel it. And a lotta diseases tend to die eventually ’cause vampires are dead.”
“Okay. So what’s the problem?”
“It’s…” I sighed. “The scary lady said… that female vampires usually use this to…”
“Have sex with male vampires?”
“Not usually. I mean, the guys can get it up usin’ this, but no. Scary lady said… female vampires use this ability to… have sex with humans to get things from ‘em.”
Kaitlyn stared at me for a moment, then shrugged. “So just like for female humans, then.”
“Well, yeah, but…” I started.
“You got some weird ways you’re still a kid, Misty,” Kaitlyn said, rolling over. That was true. “The world sucks. Sometimes you gotta do stuff you don’t like to survive.”
That was also true. I sighed. “Yeah… but I don’t like the idea.”
“So don’t,” Kaitlyn said, matter-of-fact. “You got a buncha other things you can do now. Even without special superpowers, you’re still a vampire. Just ’cause scary lady said some female vampires do it doesn’t mean you hafta do it too. So don’t.”
That’s one of the reasons Kaitlyn is my best friend. There’d been a lot of times since we moved in together where I’d start freaking out about something, and she’d just… point out something that I hadn’t thought of. Or didn’t want to because sometimes it seemed like some fucked up part of me was… I don’t know, looking for things to freak out about. And yeah, this was kind of stupid. I was a vampire, right? Walking corpse that had to drink blood to survive? And I was freaking out because some scary vampire lady said I might have to fuck someone at some point, maybe, if they had something I wanted. Thinking about what I might have to do to get blood, maybe having to fuck someone at some point between now and the end of time seemed like a stupid thing to be all strung out about. And besides, isn’t that kind of what marrying a rich guy to get out of being poor was? So, yeah, I probably wouldn’t ever do it, but it was also a stupid thing to be so upset about.
“Hey, blondie,” Kaitlyn said. “Earth to blond chick.”
I realized I’d been staring at Kaitlyn while my brain got through what I’d been thinking about. “Sorry, I just… I guess you’re right. It’s nothin’ I gotta worry about.”
“Course I’m right,” Kaitlyn said. “I always am.”
“Yeah,” I said. “If it weren’t for that, you’d be too much of a pain in the ass to keep around.” Hey, I get to mess with her sometimes, too.
“Careful, blondie,” she said. “Or we’ll figure out if you still feel being spanked.”
“You wish.”
Kaitlyn hesitated a second, then shrugged and moved back to her own bed. Which was weird. “Okay, the seeming human thing’s kinda cool,” she said. “Got any other surprises?”
I shook my head. Kaitlyn’s reaction was weird, but… I got the feeling she’d just say it was nothing if I asked. Like she wouldn’t want to talk about it. So I let it go. “There’s some other stuff, yeah. Like how, um… my body’s gonna reset back to how it was when I died every day.”
“So?”
“So I’ll lose… tattoos and scars and whatever if I get ’em now. And my hair’ll grow back if I cut it or somethin’. But if I didn’t have hair somewhere, it won’t grow back either.”
“Huh,” Kaitlyn said. “S’pose it’s a good thing you shaved everything for the party.”
“Yup. Don’t hafta shave my legs or my armpits ever again.”
“I hate you.”
“Poor girl.”
“Hey,” Kaitlyn said. “Did you really shave everywhere?”
“Um…”
“You’re blushing again.”
“Not that it’s any of your business, but yes.”
“Huh,” was all Kaitlyn said.
I looked at her. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“Really nothin’?”
“Really nothing.”
“’Cause it sounded like you were gonna say somethin’.”
“Nope.”
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
I looked at her a bit longer, then shrugged. “Okay, whatever.” It was kind of weird, but… maybe I was just being over sensitive or something.
“Got anything else to tell me about?”
I thought about it a bit. “Not… really anythin’ I wanna bring up now.”
“Okay.”
“You okay?”
Kaitlyn looked at me. “I’m fine. Why?”
“You’re actin’ weird.”
“No I’m not.”
Something had to be up with Kaitlyn. She didn’t usually get like this unless something was up. But she was getting the look where she didn’t want to talk about something, so I let it go. The rest of the evening was her asking about vampire superpowers. Her asking if I could do something, and me telling her no. I really didn’t seem to have any special powers, not like what the scary lady had talked about. Some of the powers Kaitlyn asked about were actually a thing according to the scary lady, so I told her that much at least. But yeah, I ended up kind of feeling like the runt of the vampire litter.
After Kaitlyn went to sleep, I went for a walk. Not looking for blood, just walking. Not looking for trouble. So I was more than a little annoyed when it found me. Trouble, not blood. I was walking through a darker part of the city, when I heard something from an alley I was passing. I didn’t really look that close because I thought it was probably just a homeless guy or something, but I was wrong. A couple guys stepped out of the alley wearing what looked like the sort of stuff street thugs wear. They still hung out in the alley, sort of in the shadow. Not that it mattered much.
“Not interested in playin’ right now boys,” I said. Hey, maybe it’d work. Y’never know.
The two guys looked at each other, then one said, “Good evening to you, sister.”
Well, he didn’t sound like Sage, and neither of them were hippies that I could tell. But people who’re up to anything good don’t come from dark alleys and call you sister. “How ‘bout you tell me what you want so I can decide if it’s gonna be a good evenin’,” I said. The two guys looked at each other again, then stepped forward into the light. Their clothes weren’t so much street thug as urban chic, meaning people who just wanted to look urban. But both of them had this sort of… clean-cut look to their faces and hair, sandy blond and brown. The sandy blond one had the rugged stubble thing going too like pretty boys sometimes do when they want to look more macho than they are. And they were both vampires, I could tell that now. They seemed reasonably human, but there was still something about them that made me not like them.
“We only want to talk, sister,” the sandy blond one said. Not the one that spoke before. Both of them gave me perfect pearly white smiles, and I felt even less friendly.
“Okay,” I said, folding my arms. “Talk.”
They looked at each other again. That was going to get annoying. “Did you find the pamphlet we left for you?” the brown haired one asked me.
“The… what?” The hell were they talking about?
“The pamphlet about Saint Januarius,” the sandy haired one said. “Did you find it?”
Took me a second to remember the stupid-ass thing. Of all the shit to run into, I got vampire missionaries. I really didn’t need this on top of everything else. I sighed and rolled my eyes. “No.”
“Oh,” the sandy blond one said. “Well, we have…”
“My roommate found it,” I said. “She’s totally human. Isn’t there a law against that?”
The two guys looked at each other again. Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber. “Well, sister, the text is written to conceal…” the brown haired one started.
“Nothin’,” I interrupted. “The stupid thing reads like the sorta shit really fucked up cults hand out. You realize that, right? Fuckin’ talks about how your cult doesn’t actually require members to kill people who don’t belong to the cult. Like it’s normal for any fuckin’ religion to hafta say that.”
Yep, they looked at each other. “Uh…” the brown haired one said, breaking the pattern. “Sister, we haven’t caused any breaches so far. We believe…”
“You guys are fuckin’ out of touch if you think that bullshit is normal,” I interrupted again. “Seriously. My roommate straight up asked me if it was about vampires. And she barely knew shit then ‘cept that vampires existed ’cause of me, and that there were maybe five others. But from your cheap little printout, she figured out there were lotsa vampires and that there was even a vampire religion. Real fuckin’ smart of you idiots. Why don’tcha make a TV show?” Okay, that wasn’t technically true about Kaitlyn figuring that stuff out, but fuck it, they didn’t need to know that.
They looked at each other. “Sister…” the sandy-haired one said.
“Know what?” I interrupted. “I don’t care. If this Januarius shit makes you so out of touch that you think somethin’ like that is gonna pass as normal, I don’t even wanna hear it. Far as I’m concerned, you idiots are no better than the religious assholes on my Dad’s side of the family. Just more bullshit so you can feel all holy ’cause you think God said for you to act like assholes, so you don’t gotta feel bad about how shitty you are to people who aren’t you.”
That got to them. Both of them went from annoyingly friendly missionaries to pissed off assholes pretty quick. Sandy blond even stepped forward like he was gonna try and loom over me and be all threatening. Typical, really.
“Nope, back off,” I said. “Or do you want me to tell the Baron about your little pamphlet? I’m sure he’d love to know you’re makin’ it sound like there’s a nasty cult in his town.” I looked at them, then laughed. “No, I bet he already knows and is just waitin’ for an excuse to send sword guy.”
Sandy blond stepped back again and they looked at each other. “Now, sister,” the brown haired one said. “There’s no need to be so hostile. We only want to help you.”
“Uh huh,” I said. “Well, you can help by stayin’ the hell away. Not interested in some vampire cult that’s gonna add bein’ a zealot to my list of fucked up vampire shit.”
Brown haired guy must’ve been the smart one, because he tilted his head and looks at me like he was trying to figure me out. “So,” he said. “Can we assume you also aren’t interested in the pagans?”
I snorted. “The blood witches? Fuck, no. Same reason.”
Brown haired guy nodded. “Well, I suppose that’s the best we can hope for. It’s sad when we can’t save a soul, but at least you won’t be completely lost.”
“Yay for me,” I said.
“We’ll let you take your own path, sister,” he said. “But remember, if you need help, if you need guidance, if you need a purpose, you can always come to us. You’ll always be welcome.”
“Pass,” I said. “My purpose is to not be a vampire. You guys won’t help with that.”
“If that’s your choice,” brown haired guy said. “Have a good evening, sister.” Then the two of them turned and left, though sandy blond did turn back once to look at me and sigh. I wasn’t even going to try to figure out why. I just wanted them gone. But at that point, my evening was pretty much ruined, so I started back home. I was pretty much an atheist because of my Dad’s side of the family, who were what those two seemed like they were trying to be, but… I don’t really have a problem with religious people. They keep it to themselves, and I don’t get in their face. But that wasn’t what was going on here. The religion those two were trying to push on me was some twisted vampire thing that basically made being a vampire holy. Which is like saying God told them to be an asshole and treat humans like cows. Maybe that kind of thing makes them feel better about being vampires, but that wasn’t what I was looking for. I wanted to not be a vampire. Or if I couldn’t do that, hurt as few people as I could.
Kaitlyn was asleep when I got home, which was probably best. First thing I did was take pamphlet thing off the fridge, tear it up, and flush it down the toilet. Best place for it. Of course, it plugged up the toilet, so I had to use the plunger, but somehow that seemed right, too. So I guess those two idiots actually did give my evening some kind of mystical meaning or whatever. Pretty sure they’d have been less than glad to know it was the mystic meaning of the plunger.
