Chapter Six: New Blood

It was, perhaps, too much to expect that somebody would react well to seeing a stranger in their bedroom in the middle of the night... even if that stranger was in the mirror, where that person reasonably expected to see themselves. But the person in the mirror wasn't him. The person wasn't a him at all.

A beautiful (if odd-looking) young woman around his own age stared back at him, paler-skinned, but her exact coloration hard to determine in the near-complete darkness. She looked absurd with his oversized pajamas draped about her lithe frame, thick tresses of hair everywhere, her earnest eyes wide with surprise, her full lips quivering. When Verne brought a trembling hand to his face, she did, too. Verne took in another great breath to scream again.

Just then, Verne's mother burst into the bedroom, brandishing a baseball bat. Verne was lucky his father had a late shift, because the old man probably would have been brandishing his shotgun.

"Where the heck is Verne and who are you? Lisa?"

Verne took a moment to process that - his mother had only ever met Lisa once, and that was before she and Verne had been dating. She probably didn't remember what Lisa looked like - certainly not like this.

"No..." Verne's voice was high and clear. "I'm Verne... I changed..."

"Bullshit," Ashley said with a derisive laugh. It was probably the first time he'd heard her curse since the night Wes died. She paced around him with the baseball bat at the ready but, to her credit, chose not to use it.

"I... I lied to Dottie when I said that all I took was weed... remember that Juvechrome stuff I paid so much for?"

His mother nodded but said nothing. She was still skeptical, understandably.

Verne decided not to implicate Hector... things still might go very wrong. "I got my hands on more than one dose. A lot more. And there were some pretty major side effects... you saw me swimming in my suit."

His mother nodded again, her lower lip trembling. "V... Vernon? Oh, sweet Jesus... this is real?"

"It's me, ma. Remember the time we went camping in the Blue Ridge mountains when I was maybe eight? And I got lost and trapped in Shade Gorge? I got myself trapped between two rocks, so I couldn't really scream, and it took Wes two hours to find me and push me out? You've got a picture on your dresser of Wes and me from after that, and you can still see the tears around my eyes and a red scrape along my cheek..."

Ashley dropped the baseball bat and embraced him, sobbing. "It's you... it's you. Oh lord... I don't understand how this could happen," she said. Verne didn't understand, either.

It was late, just past one in the morning - usually around Verne's bedtime, but he was wide-fucking-awake now. His mother wanted to take him to the ER, costs be damned, but Verne persuaded her that she should take him to the urgent care clinic when it opened at 6:30, instead. He padded into the bathroom and turned on the lights to get a good look at himself. He'd already screamed once at his vastly changed appearance but he still couldn't help but gasp.

First of all, he looked like a beautiful woman... and pulling down his oversized pajama pants and giving things a quick feel confirmed that he was very anatomically female. His beauty was striking, with skin a bit too pale to be normal, chestnut-brown hair with natural auburn highlights, and the pouty-mouthed face of a fashion model. His eyes were a pale hazel fringed with a blood-red corona. His smile was alluring, mysterious, and... toothy? Verne's canines, just as pearl-perfect as the rest of his teeth, were just a bit too long to be normal... and, a careful poke confirmed, deceptively sharp. Was he... a vampire? A female vampire? How was that even possible? Vampires weren't real...

Or were they? The sudden change... the craving for very rare meat and blood sausage... the aversion to sunlight and holy places... dying and changing... and, yes, the sharp canines. Were there other telltale signs? True, his skin was pretty pale, but he wasn't dead. His breath was hot and left steam on the mirror. His heartbeat was... hmm... it was... da...thump. It was very slow, but it was there. He pricked himself on the thumb with a sewing needle and watched with astonishment as no blood came out, not until he really squeezed. Then a single black bead welled up, most of it sucking right back in the moment he stopped squeezing. He watched with even more astonishment as the little dark mark of the pinprick sealed up before his eyes. Whatever he was, it wasn't normal.

"Ma, I'm going to need clothes!" He called out down the hallway. His mother shuffled into view, tears very visibly streaming down her face. She was still crying. "Jesus, mom."

He gave his mother a few minutes to recover and then met her in the little dining room of their townhouse, sipping on tea with a bewildered, bleary-eyed expression on her face. Verne sat across from her, avoiding eye contact. He could, he realized, hear the faint thumping of his mother's heartbeat – she was nervous. She smelled nervous, too. As he realized this, Verne felt a faint pressure in his cheeks, whatever that meant.

"Mom," he said. I think I'm a vampire. Is that what he'd tell her? He started laughing – a high, beautiful laugh that came across as mocking, which wasn't at all what he'd meant. "Sorry, I'm laughing at myself. I was so stupid... but I think I've figured out what happened to me."

"What?" Her expression was desperate. Pleading.

"I think the Juvechrome clinic is run by vampires, and whatever I took turned me into one." He lifted a plump lip to reveal an enlarged canine. "I wouldn't have even believed they existed, but... well, ta-da?"

To Verne's surprise, his mother laughed – the same sort of almost-mocking laugh. It ran in the family, he supposed. "I always prayed that I might have a daughter... boys are fine, but... I dunno, I thought it would fulfill me in some way. I prayed so hard. And later, more recently, I prayed that you'd be cured by whatever miracle it took. And dangit, if the Lord didn't come through... can't say I appreciate His sense of humor, though."

"More of a deal with the devil," Verne said.

Ashley crossed herself – a relic from her Catholic upbringing. Verne found that the gesture didn't bother him, even if being in a church, somehow, did. "Don't say that," she said, her dark eyebrows knit. "You're a good... boy? You're a good person, even if you've strayed now or again. We all do, but we come back to the fold. Even Job was cursed, wasn't he?"

Verne nodded – if it helped for his mother to think of this as a curse, he was fine with that. In fact, it made a lot of sense with her religious framing. The only downside was, he was sure, that she would eventually coerce him into faith healing if the situation didn't resolve itself soon. "You're right, ma. And in some ways, it's less of a curse than NVC... but, since I can't pray my way out of this curse, I really need some clothes that fit.

+++++

Verne tried on some of his mother's clothes. They were the same height now, around 5'6", and his mother had kept in admirable shape over the years. He thought her to be on the slim side of average but, even so, her clothes were too loose just about everywhere. Everywhere but the bust, which was nice and snug. His new boobs weren't conspicuously large breasts, just enough to call his otherwise-slender frame busty. Perhaps a cup larger than Lisa's B-cups, but on a frame so lean you could see the ribs when he arched his torso to either side. Those breasts also limited his top options. His nipples poked emphatically from every t-shirt he tried on, and his mother's bras were too loose in the band. So he settled on a soft green sweater that managed to cover them respectably without looking like a pillow case draped over his frame. He wore that sweater, plain beige underwear, mom jeans, and his mother's worn trainers. And, looking in the mirror, he looked like a pretty coed visiting her conservative Midwestern parents on holiday break.

"I can't believe I'm going out like this," Verne sighed.

"What are we going to tell your father?"

"About being a vampire or about being a girl? It's a lot to process."

"It's gonna be a hard sell," Ashley agreed.

Verne felt a pang in his stomach – a pang he recognized as hunger. He didn't know whether vampires got grumbling stomachs, but he knew well enough from fiction what they ate. Drank, rather. He was going to need to find a source of blood, but for now he'd make do with whatever was at hand. His mother not included, of course.

Ashley eventually retreated to her room for a few more hours of fitful sleep and Verne stalked about the house, making his way down to the garage, where his father had a chest freezer. He kept all of his hunting meat in there, cuts of venison and elk in little vacusealed packets. And, while he did a pretty good job of draining the deer, only keeping a little of the best blood for his sausages, some inevitably got left behind. Verne scrounged about four ounces of blood out of the packets and gulped it down still cool – it was a bit revolting, the vampire equivalent of eating a refrigerated flank steak with freezer burn, and barely more than a snack, but it did take the edge off his hunger. But some vampiric instinct deep within him told Verne that he'd need human blood if he was really going to sate that urge.

Verne eventually did drift off again, passing out on the couch as the TV played on mute in the background. At some point, his father returned home and trudged upstairs without even noticing the beautiful young woman curled up on the couch. Verne awoke to his mother nudging him, the harsh glare of early morning sunlight peeking through the window shades.

+++++

His reaction to being awoken was unexpected for both of them. His eyes shot open and he leapt up, knocking his mother down and straddling her right there on the couch. It all happened so quickly that his mother had time for maybe half a yelp. An inhuman hiss emanated from Verne's throat, and it startled him so much that he gasped and fell over onto the floor, scrambling back, his eyes wide with surprise.

"Sorry! Sorry," he said. "I didn't... um, vampire reflex," he said. There was a pressure at his head and at his stomach... he was hungry for blood. Famished for blood. The deer blood had barely tided him over.

Ashley struggled back to her feet, straightening her shirt out. "Wow... um... I guess I wasn't expecting that. Are you... safe to be around?"

"If you don't startle me awake, yeah," Verne said uncertainly. He could hear his mother's heartbeat. He could hear the blood coursing through her arteries, hot and thick. He could hear the hum of the air conditioning, the drone of cars on the highway, and the sound of his father sleeping upstairs. He could hear the neighbors waking up next door and a man... no, a woman doing her daily jog outside. A dog being let out to relieve itself. It took every bit of effort he could muster to focus on his mother's face and force a smile. "This is pretty new for me."

Ashley nodded – it was new for her, too. "I guess we'd better get you to urgent care."

The East Palmetto Urgent clinic was a staple for the Vera family – they had insurance, but it wasn't particularly good insurance. Even with Verne's decent insurance through work, a trip to the ER could easily amount to thousands of dollars, so the EPU clinic was the safe bet. They could take care of you, insured or not, and charged reasonable rates if you didn't mind the hour and a half wait. Of course, they showed up when it opened at six-thirty sharp, and so the wait was barely half an hour.

In his sweater and mom jeans and dark, literal pair of sunglasses (one set on top of another - he'd need to find extra dark shades to go with just one), the morning sun was barely tolerable to Verne. It wasn't like in movies or television, where the sun would make a vampire burst into flames and die a quick, painful, and dramatic death. But it was also deeply uncomfortable. With a black umbrella shielding him, it was tolerable to be out in the daylight, but every bit of unadulterated sun that touched his skin was uncomfortable, leaving little red patches of sunburn if left exposed for more than a few seconds... fortunately, they also faded and healed within a few minutes. It wasn't insta-death, but the vampire weakness to sunlight was no joke.

"We'll have to get you lots of sunscreen," Ashley said. "And sunglasses... and umbrellas... I think it might be pretty obvious that you're a vampire."

"Gee, thanks," Verne said with a sigh. "I can't believe we're going to EPU for vampirism. I hope they can cure it..."

He'd been browsing for answers on his phone and had to admit the prospects weren't good. Just as he'd have expected, vampirism wasn't a real condition, not according to the medical community. His online searches yielded insights into a strange psychosis where people thought they were dead and into weird people with a blood-drinking fetish and to dozens of fictional universes in which vampires were real, but whose strengths and weaknesses didn't seem to have anything in common with whatever strain Verne was suffering from. Was it a virus? A curse? A mutation? He didn't fucking know, and neither (apparently) did anybody else. Wherever the 'real' vampires who ran Juvechrome were, they'd done a very good job of hiding all traces of themselves within a vast distraction of fictional worlds.

He looked to the little cross necklace dangling from his mother's neck. Did crosses repel him? Looking at it was vaguely annoying... the idea of somebody warding him off with it provoked a little twinge of anxiety. Maybe there was a little something there, but it wasn't that strong. He imagined a flyer for his condition:

Want to live forever? Become a vampire! Eat nothing but blood! Gain meh powers! Suffer meh weaknesses! Randomly swap sexes! Find out how!

"At least I haven't had any NVC symptoms. I think being a vampire cured it."

"Symptoms? What symptoms?" Ashley snapped – of course, he should have told her about those earlier. Of course he hadn't.

"This random hand twitch thing that randomly started a few days ago and started getting worse. Stuff like that is predictive of worse symptoms right around the corner, so I was kind of freaking out. I didn't want to freak you out, too."

"Yeah, well, mission failed. I'm kind of freaked out," she said.

"Freaked out because I'm a surprise vampire, not because I'm going to become a vegetable and then die in a year."

"Hmm."

They drove from East Palmetto down into Longstreet – just the northern tip of it, and safe enough, especially in the daytime – past fast food restaurants, gas stations, and the old brick edifice of the Faral Avenue Community Center with its clusters of day laborers milling about the motor pool. They pulled into the clinic and queued behind the dozen or so people already waiting to be admitted. Fractured bones, weeping gashes, ill and wavering on their feet… most of them should have probably been at the ER. "We don't know that you're a..." Ashley leaned over and whispered, "you-know-what... maybe there's a reasonable explanation."

Verne shuffled as far under the EPU awning as he could. Ashley couldn't see him rolling his blood-fringed hazel eyes beneath his double sunglasses. "A reasonable explanation? How likely do you think that is?"

"Not very," Ashley admitted. She glanced to the people in front of them – a Hispanic man and his seven- or eight-year-old son. The boy's arm was clearly fractured, and he was understandably sniffling and moaning. Beyond them were an elderly couple of some Eastern European persuasion, one of whom was trickling blood from the mouth.

Trickling blood.

Verne's eyes were locked on the little rivulet of crimson oozing down the woman's chin. A few drops of it had splashed upon the ground, perfectly good blood wasted. His reptilian-slow heartbeat sped to a da-thump da-thump da-thump approaching normalcy. His vision went tunneled, the blood becoming the center of his world. He could smell it, savory and warm, from six feet away, could sense each little dribble oozing into the open air. His mouth began to water... he licked his lips and then wiped his mouth with a fluffy green sleeve, streaking something that wasn't quite saliva. His mother nudged him.

"You okay, bud?" She said it casually, but Verne could hear the tension in her voice.

"Yeah," Verne said absently.

"Then move your butt... they've just opened the clinic."

Verne sat with the EPU patient form, wondering what to put. He ticked the option for blood-borne illness – technically accurate, right? He listed a few symptoms and realized he was at a conundrum: should he list his sex change as a symptom? It was definitely a symptom – number two right after 'now a vampire' – but that was completely unbelievable. They'd think he was some young friend of Ashley's trying (unconvincingly) to use her son's insurance card. Or he could pretend he was transsexual and had transitioned... but he had no medical records whatsoever to back that up. And, having dumped all of his savings into Juvechrome treatments, he couldn't possibly pay for anything more than a few hundred dollars out-of-pocket. He left the sex change bit off and handed his documentation as-is. The nurse in reception took a glance at his form and his insurance card, chuckling to herself.

"Vera Verne?" she said.

"Um... yes?" Verne said, thinking it a bit odd for her to list his last name first.

"They listed your sex as 'male' in your patient record, honey. Oops!"

"Oops." Verne managed a nervous chuckle. He watched as the Nurse swapped his first and last name around in the record: Vera Verne, F, 21.

Just like that, he was in the system. Rather, she was in the system. He sighed and sat next to his mother, watching as the elderly couple was called back to see the doctor. The woman tossed a bloody tissue into the waste bin. It had at least a milliliter of blood soaked into the paper, dark red blooms against the white tissue. He should retrieve it...

"Vera," his mother said, a glint of mischief replacing her look of tired worry. "We got lucky there. Relax... they'll see you soon."