Misty Rose: Nature
Chapter 37
Not much really happened for the next few days, and I don’t really remember them. Did a lot more deliveries because, hey, living humans don’t really want to drive around delivering food at three in the morning in October. Go figure. Went hunting again, too. The bar scene again, only this time I picked my outfit, so I went for more lonely office worker than… whatever Kaitlyn dressed me up as. The guy I found was nicer than the first one, so I felt kind of bad about putting the bite on him and leaving but… human sex just wasn’t interesting to me, you know? And he didn’t invite me over to his place so we could watch a movie and shake hands after. But he seemed happy enough. Out cold, but happy, and I locked the door after me, so I don’t think it was all that bad overall.
Only thing worth mentioning was the package. I woke up one sunset with a cardboard box sitting on top of me, maybe a foot square. Kaitlyn was home, so I knew how it got there, but not what it was because I hadn’t ordered anything. I looked over at where Kaitlyn was sitting on her bed.
“Did you order somethin’?” I asked her.
“Nope,” she said. “Thought it was yours.”
“It’s not,” I said… and that was a problem. It’s not that I thought I was important or anything but… package neither of us ordered turning up at our PO box? Nobody sent me stuff, and I didn’t go around telling people about the PO box, so it’s not like anyone’d know. It could be anything, and I got the feeling that vampires had a bigger range of anything than humans. Well, at least normal humans. Crazy humans, not so much. So it could’ve been… I don’t know, a dead animal, or part of one. Did vampires do the horse head thing? Ferret said the ones in Chicago still made people sleep with the fishes. Or a dead rabbit. Bunny boiler? I didn’t have any ex-lovers that… well, okay, Dylan, maybe. Wasn’t sure how actually crazy he was. But he damn well didn’t know about the PO box. It didn’t smell like a dead animal, though, so it could’ve been something else. Worse, like maybe that white powder shit that I guess was some kind of disease, but why someone’d send that to a walking corpse I didn’t know. Or it might be a bomb. And it was sitting right on my chest because Kaitlyn still liked to stack things on me sometimes while I was dead, so it wasn’t like I could get away from it. I couldn’t hear any ticking but I didn’t know anything about bombs, so that wasn’t helpful.
Maybe it was my paranoia being a pain in the ass, but the idea of it being a bomb sort of took over my brain at that point. Vampires are kind of paranoid in general because we got to deal with other vampires, and… well, vampires are paranoid and suspicious of everything anyway. Sort of felt like that was part of being a vampire all by itself, just part of vampire nature.
“You gonna open it?” Kaitlyn said, looking up from her phone.
“Um…” How to be nice about this? “So, a package we didn’t order turns up, you bring it home, and put it on me while I’m dead. Ya think maybe it could be a bomb?”
“I thought you’d ordered it,” Kaitlyn said. “Your name’s on it.”
“I’da said somethin’ if it was me.”
“Huh,” was all she said. Kaitlyn looked over at the box. “That’s cool.”
“Seriously?” I said.
“Didn’t know you could order bombs off Amazon.”
I looked at what I could see of the box. Okay, yeah, it had an Amazon logo, but… “That could just be the box it was put in, you think of that?”
“You’re being paranoid,” Kaitlyn told me.
“I’m a vampire,” I said. “I’m allowed. Also, it’s sittin’ on my chest.”
“Well, if you’re not gonna open it, what’re we gonna do?”
“Um…” I really didn’t know. If it was a bomb, anything could set it off. I tried to move as little as possible while I thought about it. Came up with something but… I wasn’t too happy about it because I felt like it kind of meant I couldn’t deal with the problem. Which I couldn’t, but still. “Maybe… text Ferret? See if he’s got any ideas?”
“Texting Ferret,” Kaitlyn said, typing stuff into her phone. I waited. Kaitlyn had her sound off, so I couldn’t tell what all was going on because I couldn’t see her screen, but after a few minutes it seemed like whatever was going on was over.
“Well?” I said.
“Oh,” Kaitlyn said, like I hadn’t been laying on my back waiting to find out what to do about what might be a bomb on my chest for like five minutes. “You’re fine.”
“Details,” I said. Glaring at someone upside down isn’t very effective, but it was the best I could do with where my head was and where Kaitlyn was sitting.
“Ferret said, ‘Oh, good, it’s there.’ Then he said he’d be over in a bit.”
Okay. Well, Ferret ordered whatever it was, I guess. Which probably meant it wasn’t a bomb, or at least that it wouldn’t blow up right now because he’s our friend. But I wasn’t ruling out a bomb, just that Ferret probably wouldn’t have a bomb sent to us that was going to blow up. So I reached up and carefully lifted it off my chest, then set it to the side and sat up.
“Hey, it didn’t explode,” Kaitlyn said and grinned at me. I stuck my tongue out at her and got up and headed to the bathroom to shower. Vampires didn’t sweat, but I was feeling a little gritty, probably road dirt from all the driving around I was doing. Or maybe Kaitlyn had poured some grit on me while I was asleep too, I don’t know, she might. Either way, shower time. I did my usual too hot for humans to tolerate thing and got myself all clean. Only problem was I didn’t notice that all the bath towels were somewhere else until I got out of the shower. I tried to dry off with the hand towels that were there, but that didn’t work too well, so I had to get help.
“Kaitlyn?” I called through the door. No response, so I yelled, “KAITLYN! NO BATH TOWELS IN HERE!” She’d probably washed them and forgotten to put them back or something so she’d know where they were and could hand one in for me. Only she didn’t respond. I looked at the hand towels and sighed because there didn’t seem to be any choice. I could stand there and drip dry, which was already getting cold, or I go out into the main room and look for a towel. And it’s not like I had a lot of time because Ferret was going to turn up in whatever “a bit” meant. With Kaitlyn, a bit could be a few seconds, or it could be a couple days, or anything between. I picked up a couple of the hand towels and covered myself as best as I could. Hey, I can be sort of shy, okay?
Well, I didn’t do the thing where I walk into another room already saying something and see there’s a guy there, but I did do the rest of the cliché. Walked into main room, saw Ferret, screamed, jumped back, and ran back into the bathroom. Managed to keep both hand towels, but really, I should have just stuck my head around the door to see what Kaitlyn was doing instead of getting me a bigger towel. “WHAT THE FUCK, YOU GUYS?!” I yelled back into the main room. Yeah, I was pissed. Our apartment is tiny, so it’s not like Kaitlyn wouldn’t have heard me, but instead I walked out pretty much naked while Ferret was there, and he was still a guy for all of being a rodent-looking vampire. I’d also have been blushing if vampires could blush, but we can’t, so at least Kaitlyn wouldn’t be able to give me any shit about that. Got to look for the bright side, right? Like there was one.
A few moments later, Kaitlyn turned up at the door with a bath towel, which she tossed to me. “The fuck is wrong with you?” I said, wrapping it around myself. I was still sort of damp, but at that point, I was too pissed off to care anymore. Kaitlyn just grinned at me and went back to the main room. Like I said, sometimes she can be fucking annoying, and sometimes she took things too far. I stayed in the bathroom for a bit, calming down. But I’d have to go back out again because my robe and my clothes and stuff were in the other room, and I didn’t think Kaitlyn would bring those, too.
When I went back out into the main room again, Ferret was sitting on my bed, with Kaitlyn sitting on her bed next to him. Both of them were looking at me. I glared at Kaitlyn and went straight for my closet, where my robe was hanging up because the bath towel was covering but wasn’t as covering as I’d have liked with a guy in the room. Then I turned my back on them to put on my robe.
“You know your closet has a mirror on the door, right?” Kaitlyn said from behind me. And she was right. I could see both of them clearly in the mirror, which meant they could probably see me, too. I thought about going back into the bathroom, but then decided fuck it, closed my eyes, and concentrated. When I opened them again, my reflection in the mirror was blurry, like the mirror was fogged over or really out of focus or whatever. It wouldn’t stay that way long, but it meant they couldn’t see a damn thing I didn’t want them to. I still was careful anyway, though, and closed my robe before dropping the towel underneath it. I could see Kaitlyn watching me in the mirror with a pout on her face. Ferret had looked away, at the box sitting on the bed between them, so at least one of the people there had some kind of sense of decency. I tied my robe and turned around so I could fold my arms and glare at Kaitlyn again.
“What?” Kaitlyn said.
“You know what,” I said. “Trickin’ me into bein’ naked in front of Ferret.”
“You had the towels,” Kaitlyn said.
“Almost naked. Whatever,” I told her. “That’s on you.”
“You don’t know it was me,” Kaitlyn said. “Could’ve been Ferret.”
“Not his style,” I told her. “Towels weren’t stolen, just somewhere else.”
“I object to that,” Ferret said.
“And he wouldn’t have the motivation to see me naked, either,” I said, ignoring him.
“Seriously?” Kaitlyn asked me. “Why?”
I nodded at Ferret. “Tell her,” I said.
“Why me?” Ferret asked.
“She won’t believe it if I say it,” I told him.
Ferret looked at me a moment, then cleared his throat. “Technically,” he said to Kaitlyn. “The only person in this room with a normal human libido is you.”
“Meaning?” Kaitlyn asked him.
“Meaning that either of you could be naked in front of me and I wouldn’t have a… male reaction,” Ferret said, then shrugged. “You’d be interesting to look at, but that’s it.”
“So?” Kaitlyn said.
“So the only one with a pressing need to see me naked is you, Kaitlyn,” I told her. “Which means it was prob’ly your idea, and you dragged Ferret into it.”
“It’s true,” Ferret said, pressing the back of his hand to his forehead. “I was led down a dark path by the nefarious schemes of a devious woman.”
“Traitor,” Kaitlyn called him. Ferret just grinned at her.
“Mmmhmm,” I said. “You’ve been caught, missy.”
“Okay, fine, it was me,” Kaitlyn said throwing her hands up dramatically. “Whatcha gonna do?”
Good question. Truth was, I wasn’t really mad anymore. In a kind of weird way, it didn’t seem to matter all that much once I got over the shock. I mean, it wasn’t like I was going to run around naked or anything in front of people like Ferret and… well, I was pretty sure I’d still scream and stuff because it’s what I’ve done since I was a little girl, you know? And I wasn’t going to just let Kaitlyn pull that kind of shit because she’d probably manage to take it even farther too far if I did. Maybe it was the vampire talking but… I just didn’t care as much now. At least, not when it was just her and maybe Ferret.
Well, okay, lack of male reaction aside, probably not Ferret.
Anyway, I still had to do something to punish Kaitlyn for the joke. So I walked over to her all angry, like I was going to smack her or something. Kept glaring, too. And I just stood there until she started looking less defiant and more like maybe she’d fucked up. Then I yelled, “TICKLE MONSTER!” and jumped on her and started tickling her like crazy. Of course, she started giggling and laughing and squirming around like crazy, but I didn’t let her get free. Ferret didn’t really seem to react except that he picked up the box and moved it out of the way. I kept tickling Kaitlyn until she started gasping about how she was going to pee, then kept it up just a bit longer before I stopped. Kaitlyn rolled off her bed and more or less ran for the bathroom, so I figured I’d made my point. Ferret had his phone out and was looking at it. Sort of. I don’t think he was totally ignoring us, but the act was nice.
“GOD DAMMIT, YOU MADE ME PEE!” Kaitlyn yelled from the bathroom. “NEED CLEAN UNDERWEAR!”
I flopped over and looked at Ferret. “Really?” I asked him.
“Hmm?” Ferret said, looking up from his phone.
“You’d find me interestin’ to look at?”
Don’t think he was expecting that question because he kind of froze for a moment, then shrugged. “You’re a reasonably attractive woman,” he said. “I’m a vampire. I’m not dead.”
“Well, I’m reasonably flattered,” I said. “And vampires are dead.”
“Undead is not dead,” Ferret said. “There’s a difference.”
“GOD DAMMIT, MISTY!” Kaitlyn yelled from the bathroom. “UNDERWEAR! NOW!”
“Think I should?” I asked Ferret.
“Let her yell one more time,” Ferret grinned at me.
I grinned back, then rolled over. Kaitlyn had this habit of leaving her clothes laying around instead of putting them away, and yeah, she had at least one pair of clean underwear just laying out where anyone could see it. Like Ferret. But it’d do fine. I concentrated on it, and after a moment, it sort of flopped around and rose into the air. I glanced back and Ferret was watching them too.
“FOR FUCK’S SAKE, MISTY, I’M SORRY!” Kaitlyn yelled.
I didn’t say anything because I was concentrating on moving her underwear towards the bathroom. It was already giving me a headache, but it was worth it because of how Kaitlyn swore again when I sort of… hurled her underwear through the open door. With my mind. I started rubbing my temples, but I was grinning too.
“That’s still a pretty unusual ability,” Ferret said.
“Tele-whatsis,” I said.
“Telekinesis. I asked around, and no one’d even heard of vampires who could do that.”
“No one has, I guess. Kaitlyn thinks I’m a mutant.”
“Mmm… could be. Some bloodline no one’s heard of, maybe.”
“No clue.”
“You figure out anything else?”
“Nope,” I said. The headache was going away, thank god. Right about then, Kaitlyn came out of the bathroom. I noticed she was careful to sit down on the other side of Ferret from me, so yeah, I think I made my point. I rubbed my temples some more and waited for the headache to go away.
Ferret cleared his throat. “So, um…” he started.
“The package,” I said. “Yeah. What is it?”
“Misty thinks it’s a bomb,” Kaitlyn said from the other side of the bed.
“I said it could be a bomb,” I told Ferret. “But that you prob’ly wouldn’t send us one.”
“Only probably?” Ferret asked me, but he was grinning.
“Depends on if it was stolen or not,” I said. “How’d you find out about our PO box?”
“Kaitlyn told me,” Ferret said.
I glared at Kaitlyn. “She didn’t tell me that.”
“Didn’t think it was important,” Kaitlyn shrugged at me.
“Not important?” I said. “How long did I spend thinkin’ it was a bomb?”
“Not my fault you’re paranoid,” Kaitlyn told me.
“Actually, it’s not a bad idea to be a little paranoid,” Ferret said. “We’re vampires, after all.”
“See?” I looked at Kaitlyn, who stuck her tongue out at me.
“Still being paranoid,” Kaitlyn told me. I stuck out my tongue back.
“So what’s that?” I nodded at the box.
“Something I bought off Amazon like a civilized person,” Ferret said, sniffing. He picked up the box, and a knife sort of… appeared in his hand. Little one, so I assumed it was just a tool. Ferret carefully cut the tape on the box, then opened the top and pulled out… well, it looked like the box for a camera of some kind. Digital thing, I couldn’t really see the text.
“Okay,” Kaitlyn said. “A camera. Misty doesn’t like cameras.”
“Spy cams, dumbass,” I told her. “I don’t like spy cams. That thing is…”
“High end video recorder,” Ferret said. “Like what they use to film movies now, but smaller, easier to use, and it records audio, too.”
I looked at the thing. Well, the box certainly looked like what they put expensive stuff in. “Okay,” I said. “But why? Neither of us are cam girls or YouTube stars.”
“You remember how I make my living?” Ferret asked me.
“Theft,” I said, sticking my tongue out at him.
“That’s more of a calling than a mere profession,” Ferret said. “What I do for money, and usually stupidly large amounts of money, is teach old vampires about tech.”
“Yeah, you mentioned that,” I said.
“Sounds fun,” Kaitlyn said.
“Like teaching a rock to hang glide sometimes,” Ferret grinned at her. “But they pick up some things, and it definitely pays the bills.”
“I thought theft paid the bills,” I grinned at Ferret.
“Stealing for mere monetary gain ruins the art,” Ferret said, all snooty-like.
“Uh huh,” I said, rolling my eyes. “So what’s that got to do with the camera?”
Ferret looked at Kaitlyn for a moment before going on. “Victoria told you about vampire memory, right?” he asked me. “And vampire dreams?”
“What’s that mean?” Kaitlyn asked.
“Uh…” I glanced at Ferret, who shrugged. “It’s… basically when a vampire dreams. Usually while they’re dead for the day, but… it can happen at other times, too. Like when they’re in a coma from not having enough blood or bein’ staked. ‘Cept ’cause they’re in a coma, they can’t wake up. And sometimes, um… vampires that’re like that for a real long time stop bein’ able to tell the difference between their dreams and what really happened.”
“Oh,” Kaitlyn said, frowning. “That must suck.”
“It does,” Ferret said. “Or so I hear. But some vampires that’ve been active for a long time do it voluntarily. For a lot of different reasons. And they don’t want to forget who they are.”
“Okay,” I said. “So?”
“So some of them write journals,” Ferret said. “Who they are, what they’ve done, what they want to remember. Then they hide them, or keep them close for when they wake up.”
“Does that work?” Kaitlyn asked.
“Sometimes,” Ferret said. “Or sometimes they get stolen or destroyed, or an enemy alters them, or a vampire thinks the journals have been altered. Or are just plain lying.”
“Still don’t see what that has to do with a camera,” I told Ferret.
“Sometimes vampires want advice on journals,” Ferret said. “Ways to make journals that aren’t just writing it all down in a book where anyone could read it. So… I tell them about recorders, encryption, that sort of thing. Some of them even understand the idea.”
“So it’s… sort of like vampires go senile,” Kaitlyn said. “So they keep journals.”
“In a way,” Ferret shrugged. “Vampires can live a long time, and our brains aren’t really any better at remembering things than human brains, so we forget things.”
I looked down at the thing. It wasn’t very big, but it definitely looked expensive. And I’d have to learn how to use it. And there were some other problems. “Okay,” I said. “But this means it’d all still be on camera. Someone else could get the… disc or whatever and watch it.”
“Sure,” Ferret said. “But this model automatically encrypts the video.” He looked at both of us, and I guess we didn’t look like we knew what he meant. “You can put a password on the files and make them a lot harder for anyone who doesn’t know it to see them. You can also do basic editing right on the camera, because I know you two don’t have a computer.”
“Okay, sure,” I said. “But wouldn’t it sort of be risking telling someone about vampires?”
“Not if you don’t record anything supernatural,” Ferret said. “You’d just be some girl talking to the camera about stuff people don’t believe is real. And even if you did, there’s a lot of movies with CG effects now. You could be a film major doing a project.”
I frowned at the box. “I’m not gonna be goin’ senile any time soon,” I said.
“Says you,” Kaitlyn said, grinning. I stuck my tongue out at her.
“it might still be useful to keep a journal,” Ferret smiled at me. “Something you can go back to every so often to see how you are compared to back then.”
I looked at Ferret for a moment. “Pops suggested that, didn’t he? Or Father Riggs.”
“Both of them, actually,” Ferret grinned. “In different ways.”
“Well, if they both said it…” I said, turning the box over in my hands. Interesting idea, yeah. I’d have to record stuff while Kaitlyn wasn’t home, or she’d mess with it. And I’d have to learn to use the thing, which was what the rest of the night ended up being until Kaitlyn went to bed and Ferret had to leave. But yeah, that’s the conversation that started me doing a journal. Eventually. I didn’t start right that instant, but that was really where the idea started. Just thought I should include why I started doing this thing in the first place. It isn’t a video journal, though. I’ll get to why some other time.
