Legend of the Virgin Vampire
Part Two
I sat in the shade of a clump of elm trees, watching Sidney's house. The day was cold and clear, the sun scorching, but the property was quiet. I had done my due diligence and checked the place for signs of danger. I knew now what I'd been searching for, that night I mindlessly prowled the backyards of my neighborhood in my bare feet. I had been pushed by an unnamed fear, not of a criminal or an animal, but of Parva. And now, no matter where I went, that same fear kept me more vigilant than I'd ever been in my life.
I could hear Sid in her basement bedroom, her heart beating, her hands busy with a game on one of her handhelds. Still alive, just as I had been promised she would be. It was noon and I was supposed to be at school. I'd sneaked off campus right before lunch, hoping to maximize the amount of time I could be gone and minimize the classes I would miss. Because I had a job to do and I was in a hurry, get it? Yet here I still stood, outside the house, listening to Sid's life-sounds from the safety of the elm trees like a coward.
How could I face her again? How could I ever face anyone I respected again? I'd violated Sidney in what might be the worst possible way. I'd violated her mind. And now the bond called me to her so I could violate her again. It didn't matter that the bond would be pushing her, too. That was part of the trap. Vampire Stockholm syndrome. No matter how much she loathed me, she would be punished for staying away from me. How could I go to her and demand access to her flesh when I knew she couldn't say no?
I sat under the trees as long as I could, putting off the inevitable, hating myself for being unable to choose a path. When I couldn't afford to wait any longer, I got the spare key from under one of Mrs. Cross's succulents and let myself in the back door. Then I moved silently through the house and down the basement stairs. Just before I let myself into Sid's room, I realized I hadn't even warned her I was coming. What was I about to do? Barge in without knocking? Sneak in and bite her before she realized I was there?
But I couldn't make myself knock. I couldn’t. Knocking was too noisy. It let your enemies know where you were. So all I could do was step into the open doorway and wait for her to see me.
She sat up in bed, surrounded by a box of kleenex, a thermometer, and a jar of vapor rub, playing her game. I recognized the tinny, retro music: it was the theme from the third level of Ultimate Zombie Bouken 2. Sidney looked absolutely awful. Her face was chalky white, her throat covered with bruises on both sides. The right side was Parva. The left side, me. I was so ashamed. I should have taken her to a hospital. Why had I trusted Parva when she told me Sid would be okay?
At some point, Sidney's character in the game died. She cursed quietly and closed the game, and that's when she looked up and saw me. She gasped, started, and almost chucked the handheld at me.
“Nate!” she said.
“I'm sorry,” I said.
“What the hell are you doing? Can't you knock? Can't you call?”
“I know. I should have. I'm sorry.”
“Stop apologizing. It only makes you feel better.”
I stepped into her room and took off my sunglasses. This was one of the few places where I didn't need them. There were no windows because it was in the basement. Purple fabric hung from the walls like medieval tapestries, and her blankets and bedclothes were black. The floor was hardwood laminate in a dark, rich brown. I'd seen the room for the first time when I brought Sid home the day before. I'd had to carry her in.
“How are you feeling?” I said.
“Like shit.”
“Are you drinking lots of fluids?”
She pointed to a green sports drink that sat on her nightstand. I nodded.
Sid rubbed her hands against the blankets. I didn't know what to say. I yearned to touch her, which definitely meant that she wanted me to. But I made myself wait. I had to learn how to control myself.
She said, “This is never going away, is it?”
“No.”
She sighed, leaned back against her pillows, and gazed up at the ceiling. Her hands lay alongside her body on the bed. Her fingers gripped and massaged her comforter. “I'm so stupid. I should never have let you bite me.”
I'm not going to say that didn't hurt. Even though it made sense for her to feel that way, it was still painful. Like when you're goofing around and someone or something vaguely hits you in the balls, and nobody notices and you play it cool but it still makes you want to puke. Guys will understand this.
I said, “If I could take this back, I swear to god I would.”
“You were in my head, Nathaniel.”
I looked away.
“Did you know you could do that?” she said. It was an accusation. I had a power and I'd hidden it from her.
“I knew I could do something. I didn't know it would be like that.”
Her hands kept working the blankets. She wouldn't look at me, so I glanced around for a place to sit. The bed was out, obviously. The only other option was an antique red velvet loveseat that looked exactly like a place where one of Dracula's victims would lie while he defiled their innocent flesh. I felt conspicuous as hell when I sat on it.
Sid picked up her game again and went back to playing. Like I wasn't there anymore. With nothing else to do, I listened to her play. She'd moved on to level four, judging by the symphonic music and the constant machine gun fire. She played through without trouble for a while, but then she died twice in a row. I knew where she was. The mid-boss on the fourth level was notoriously difficult.
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I said, “Use your knives. He has a weak spot for knives behind his head.”
“Don't listen!” she said.
“I can't help it.”
I heard the mid-boss die. Then Sid tossed her game aside. Her hands were really shaking now.
“Come here,” she said.
Finally, the permission I'd been waiting for. I moved from the couch to the bed and sat beside her. She stiffened, but she didn't reject me.
I took her hand. It was ice cold. She took in a slow breath through her nose. Then another.
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It wasn't enough. She dropped my hand, twisted toward me, and pulled me into a hug. Her arms went around me. Hands squeaked against the material of my jacket. I pulled her face into my neck and rubbed my thumb against her cheek. It was the only place where her bare skin met mine.
Fingers grasped at the bottom edge of my jacket. She said, “Can't you take this stupid thing off?”
I let her go and took off the jacket. I let it fall to the floor and pulled Sid against me again. Her hands slipped up under the sleeves of my t-shirt. Her small body was rigid, but she grasped at my arms and put her head against my chest. I recognized this internal conflict from Emily. There was one more thing she needed.
With my free hand, I pushed her hair from her neck. I leaned in slowly, giving her a chance to push me away. When my teeth touched her throat, she sucked in a breath.
“Be careful,” she said. Not wait or don't or stop. Be careful.
I pierced her gently and waited until the tiniest bit of blood welled up in the wound. I licked it off and she sighed. I felt what was left of the tension leave her body and she leaned against me with no more resistance than a wet towel.
I breathed in her scent. She was sweaty and acrid from our ordeal in the rental house, but that didn't bother me. What bothered me was the smell of my own blood all over her. Such an animal yesterday. So unforgivable.
We were quiet for a while. Sidney was the first to break the silence. She said, “I thought it was crazy, the idea of killing you. I still do. But it was an option. You tried to give me an option. And now I don't even have that.”
“Maybe you could still put out a hit.” It was a stupid thing to say, a geeky compulsion to make jokes when things got uncomfortable. But Sid answered me seriously.
“Even if I could make myself want to now, it wouldn't work. I don't think even a hitman could stop you.”
“Why not?”
“You're not human.”
She said this with terrible conviction. Not stating the obvious, which is that I had developed characteristics that might not be classically defined as “human,” but coming to terms with something much darker than that.
“It was your eyes,” she said. “Right before you bit me. They weren't human eyes. There was something else controlling you. Something . . .” She searched for a word, and I tried to help.
“Animal?”
“No, you're not hearing me. Not animal. Not even material. Something immortal.” She winced at the word, but let it stand.
I understood what she meant now, but that didn't mean I wanted to accept it.
I said, “At first I thought all these changes were just biological. But not anymore. I guess it could be biology I don't understand, but---”
“No,” said Sid. And that was it. She'd seen something I hadn't, not even in Parva. It wasn't biology.
Parva. Remembering her filled me with insecurity. I pulled Sid closer, revisited her wound, let my hands find whatever skin I wouldn't be slapped for touching. Tremors ran through her body as she learned to accept the unacceptable.
There was a question burning inside me. The thing I most wanted to know, but was most afraid to ask. The fear, I knew, came from an irrational place. As insane as it was, part of me still felt betrayed by the fact that Parva had been invited into that house with Sidney when I had not. And don't think I don't know how entitled and possessive that sounds. With the people I've bonded to, I am entitled and possessive.
I made myself ask. About Parva, and about how she had ended up with access to my Sidney.
“She told me everything,” said Sid. “At least, that's what I thought. She told me she couldn't get in without being invited. But she said you had 'tricks,' and she showed me the gag. She said keeping you outside until the bond was broken would set me free and teach you a little lesson. It had nothing to do with me. And I was stupid enough to trust her.”
“That's what she does,” I said. “She makes people trust her.”
Anguished, she said, “She bit me, Nate.”
I nodded. It was a boat we'd both been in.
“I've never felt pain like that,” she said.
“She's got some venom or something,” I said. “I felt her inject it when she changed me. And I think she used it on you, too.”
My heart raced as I remembered the moment when Parva's teeth sank into my Sid. Parva's poison, too, had gotten into Sidney and interrupted my connection to her. Distraught, I tried to go back to Sid's wound. It had closed, but I wouldn't permit myself to bite her again.
“Do you make venom?” said Sid.
“I don't know.” It wasn't anything I'd thought to ask.
“I think you do. I think something's getting in there.”
“Why? Does it hurt?”
“I'm addicted to something, right? Something keeps making me let you bite me when I should be kicking you in the crotch.” She was so bitter, so angry, that it was much later before I realized that she never answered my second question.
“I don't understand why she didn't kill me,” Sidney said. “I thought she was going to. When the pain started, I thought, this is it. There's no way I'm walking away from this.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know why she didn't kill me?”
I did, and I didn't want to tell her. But she had to know what to expect. If she had any chance of helping herself, she had to know.
I said, “She said she's not done with you.”
Sid sat up and pulled away from me. I made myself let her go.
“What does that mean?” she said.
“I don't know.”
Sid got up from the bed and walked away, running her hands through her hair. Her walk was not entirely steady. The back of her shirt said Vehicle makes sudden stops. Back the hell off.
She turned back to face me and said, “So what are you going to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“You're the reason I'm in this mess. How are you going to stop that bitch from hurting me again?”
Of course, this was the same question I'd been asking myself since yesterday. What could I do about Parva? What power did I have against her? None. None at all. She was a foot shorter than me and could toss me like used tissue.
When no answer came out of me, Sid narrowed her eyes and approached me.
“What are you going to do about this, Nate?”
Sidney stared me down, oddly intimidating for a human girl who was half-drained and looked more like Night of the Living Dead than I did. Maybe that was the point.
“I don't know if I can stop her,” I finally admitted. “She's stronger than I am. And faster. And she doesn't have a mommy breathing down her neck.”
“A mommy? Is that supposed to be an excuse?”
“No, but---”
“So you're just going to stand there while Parva kills me and Emily?”
“Of course not, but---”
Through her teeth, she said, “You'd better listen to me. You initiated us into this cult. If you're going to play god, then you have to do God's job.”
“I'm trying,” I said. “I stayed up all night keeping an ear on Emily in case something happened. I'm going to check on you whenever I can. But there's only so much I can do.”
“Obviously you have to figure out what it is that Parva has that you don't. You're a vampire, too, right? Then you should be able to do whatever it is she's doing to become a beast.”
I had a feeling that I knew the answer to this question. In my life, I'd probably consumed two dozen vampire movies and novels, and while I now knew that most of them were unrealistic and stupid, there was still truth to be found in them. It looked like themes that popped up again and again regardless of the surrounding content. For example, in nearly all vampire media, sunlight is the enemy. Bloodlust is real and irresistible. One can become a vampire by getting bitten by another vampire, and it's a dangerous transformation that looks a lot like death.
And one more thing: the strength of a vampire depended on how much blood he drank. In every novel and every movie, that fact held true. It also seemed to be reflected in my own experience, because Parva knocked back a six-pack of street urchins every night and I subsisted on a trickle from two tiny women. I always felt like I was one feeding away from starvation.
“What aren't you saying?” said Sid.
“I think it's blood.” And that was all I had to say. Sid knew the lore, too. She sank to the bed beside me.
“Crap.”
“Yeah.”
She chewed her bottom lip for a moment. Then she said, “You have to get more people.”
“You mean, bond to more people?” I said, incredulous.
“However you have to do it.”
“I can't. Nobody else is going to want to do this.”
“Really? No one?”
“Of course not!”
“Not even a hopeless geek who likes witchcraft and has a giant crush on you?”
“Oh, please. No way.”
“It doesn't have to be Megan, but it has to be somebody. You can't just ignore Parva and hope she goes away.”
I hated that she was right. But who could I ask? Who on earth would voluntarily become a vampire's slave? No one, that was who. No one I wanted to spend forever with, anyway.
“Think Porter would go for it?” I said sarcastically.
Sid squinted at me. “Just so we're clear, my little brother is a diamond-encrusted turd monkey. But if you do this to him, I will break your legs.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the jar of vapor rub lying next to Sid's pillow. I picked it up and said, “What's the deal with this?”
“Apparently my mom can't tell the difference between a vampire attack and the flu.”
I chuckled, but Sid did not. She took the vapor rub away from me and then clasped the front of my shirt. Not aggressively, but enough to make sure she had my attention.
“You will not try to joke, evade, or ignore your way out of this. Nothing you have to do is more important than stopping Parva. Not Porter's game, not school, not your mommy's feelings. Got it?”
“I know, Sid.”
“You better. Because if I have to leave my life in your hands, then I don't want to see you wasting a second on anything else until the bitch is gone.”
She was just like Porter when you got down to it. But she was right. And I didn't need her to tell me that nothing mattered except keeping her safe. I knew nothing else mattered.
And that was the real reason I hated myself. Not because I'd bonded with her. Not because I'd violated her mind. I hated myself because Sidney and Emily needed me to kill Parva to keep them safe. And I knew I couldn't do it.