Chapter Seven: The Need to Feed

'Soon' ended up being thirty minutes, plus another ten in the exam room. The room was barely more than a closet with an exam table, a clinician's chair, and a patient's stool, but at least it offered privacy. The orderly took his height and weight – 5'6" on the nose in socks and 114 pounds with his clothes on but no shoes – and spent five minutes trying to get Verne's blood pressure before Verne thought to focus on the sound of the man's blood, imagining it rich and red and oxygen-saturated in his arteries, and that brought his heart rate up enough that the man could finally scribble down a blood pressure: 85/45 with a conspicuous question mark next to it.

He could hear the discussion out in the hallway, of the physician on duty deciding that Verne's vague reference to a blood-borne illness required his attention and swapping assignments with the RN. He stepped into the room – a tall, dark-haired man around the age of Verne's father. Given Verne's current size, the man's six and a half feet seemed absolutely enormous. As an adult, he'd never seen somebody that proportionally large compared to him.

"Hello," Verne said uncertainly, his voice suddenly weak and faltering.

"Miss Verne?" He offered a warm smile and gestured toward the stool. "I'm Dr. Nagy. Mind telling me what seems to be the problem?"

"I was hoping you could tell me. I've dropped a lot of weight recently, collapsed in front of church the other day, and I'm pale as hell. If I didn't know any better, I'd think I was turning into a vampire."

He gauged the doctor's response: a nervous chuckle. He turned back to Verne's medical history. "At your last visit you were... 162... and six feet even. You're not six feet tall."

"I'm not," Verne agreed. "Do you ever get people experiencing profound, full-body changes?"

The doctor clearly wasn't buying the sex-swapped-vampire hints that Verne was dropping at him, and Verne wasn't about to make it explicit, lest he be diagnosed with a mental illness. Rather than pressing his luck, he angled for anemia, eventually describing the symptoms well enough that the doctor overlooked the little hiccup at the beginning of their conversation. Dr. Nagy scribbled down some notes and then had Verne look into a light. Verne's response was immediate and profound: a big flinch and a hiss that he barely managed to repress. He caught his breath and smiled sheepishly.

"Sorry..."

"Photophobia," Dr. Nagy said. "Have you been bitten by any animals recently? Any confusion, irritability, seizures or tremors?"

"Um... no, no animal bites," Verne said. As for the other symptoms... yes, all of them, to some extent. But he was pretty sure he didn't have vampirism and rabies confused.

"Hmm. What about any sudden knocks to the head? You said you fell down."

"I don't think so." He tapped his head with his knuckles. "Knock-free. And, um... I had a very upset stomach the other day with a large, black bowel movement, and that was around the time the other symptoms started."

"And since then?"

Verne shrugged. "Nothing. But I'm very pale and have trouble sleeping... and I've had strange, uh, food cravings."

"I see. Well, I'm going to order a GI screen and a neurological screen... it should be covered by your insurance. I'm going to feel your abdomen and lower chest for internal bleeding, okay? I'm going to need you to take your sweater and jeans off... underpants are fine. Is that okay?"

"F- fine," Verne said.

He could tell he was close to getting an order for blood - all he had to do was convince the doctor he was anemic. He'd do anything for blood… pressure was slowly building in his cheeks. He stripped his sweater right off, revealing his porcelain-smooth skin and pert breasts... he thought he ought to feel embarrassed, but didn't really care. Nor did he care that he was perched on an examination stool in his mother's socks and slightly-loose underpants a moment later. Dr. Nagy was clinical and professional and, if he stole any lascivious glimpses at Verne, he couldn’t tell and didn't really care. All he cared about was blood. It didn't really feel like his body, anyway. And it didn't feel like he had any internal bleeding, either.

"I don't feel anything unusual, but I can't rule out a GI bleed. Do you know your blood type?"

"AB positive," Verne said quickly.

"Good. That's good. I'm going to order one unit, plus a GI scan to check for bleeding, plus some iron supplements. We'll get you fixed up, Miss Verne, okay?"

"Thanks, doc."

Fortunately, the EPU clinic was right down the street from the Longstreet Emergency Hospital and had access to their phlebotomy facilities. Thirty minutes later and a quick trip up the road, and Verne was sitting with his mother in the phlebotomy center with a pint of AB+ blood getting carted his way. He eyed the dark red packet greedily as the nurse dug around trying to find a vein. It hurt a lot less than it usually did when they couldn't find a vein (which, having a deadly chronic illness, Verne had some experience with). Where all of his other senses were ramped way up, the sensation of pain was deeply muted – the needle provided little flashes of discomfort that eased away just after Verne registered them.

"Squeeze my arm way, way harder," Verne said, pointing to the little pressure cuff. "Believe me."

Eventually, the nurse found a tiny plume of black blood and, figuring that was as good as she was going to get, hooked Verne up to the blood drip. Then, as soon as she was away with her attention on another patient, Verne took the IV out of his arm, bit into the pack with his sharp canines, and started slurping directly out of it. It was amazing. Better than anything he'd ever tasted, rich and warm and vibrating across all of his senses. The low groan he made was a lot like the one Lisa made when he was doing a very good job in bed. His mother, sitting next to him, quickly replaced her worried expression with one of horrified disgust.

"Can you... not do that?" she asked, gesturing vaguely at Verne.

"No," Verne said. It came out as half-growl. The blood was good. It was warmth. When the flow slowed, he squeezed at the bag, pumping as much as he could out before finally tearing the bag open and licking every last trace out. Then he sat back, eyes half-lidded, and burped. "Best. Meal. Ever," he mumbled.

"Are you crazy?" Ashley hissed. "Thank God nobody saw you."

She didn't understand how much he'd needed that. How could she possibly? When she'd asked Verne earlier whether he was safe to be around, he'd answered in the affirmative. But, given another day or two of gradually intensifying cravings? He might have drained anybody, even his mother. It was good to know that a pint of the stuff was enough to satisfy him even when he had a serious hankering – he wouldn't have to drain anybody dry to feed himself since the average person had ten or eleven pints of blood. But even a sip of the AB+ human blood was so monumentally superior to the few ounces of deer's blood he'd scavenged from the freezer earlier that he knew there was no going back. However often he needed to feed, it would have to be on human blood, a pint at a time.

"We should probably go," Verne said. He shoved the ruined blood bag into the trash as they left, his mother jogging to keep up and grumbling that they hadn't even done his GI scans.

+++++

Verne's mother was annoyed with him, but her ire was in many ways a welcome return to normalcy. She was annoyed at his nearly making a scene at the phlebotomy center and annoyed that he hadn't tried harder to ask about a cure for his vampirism. From his gauging Dr. Nagy's reaction, though, he was virtually certain the doctor hadn't the faintest clue that vampires were real. He'd been able to hear the man's heartbeat, could perceive all of the little twitches and quivering of the doctor's muscles, and there was no hint of recognition or deception there. It was absurd how sensitive Verne's senses were – if he concentrated, he could hear the sounds of his thick eyelashes fluttering the air when he blinked, could hear his bones sliding against one another as he moved, could smell Zeke's fur in the carpet – his parents' old wolfhound, and he'd been dead for two years, could spot little motes of dust drifting in the shadows just as surely as if they were illuminated in late afternoon sunbeams. Could hear the creak of the dining room chair as his father sat in it – from the tiny crack of tearing wood fibers, Verne guessed that the chair was at most a month away from collapsing under an occupant's weight and making somebody look very fat or foolish.

"Where's Verne? I thought he was still here?" Vic Vera said.

"I think he went home," Ashley said. Through the door and all the way downstairs, Verne couldn't quite hear her heartbeat to know if she felt a twinge of anxiety at the lie. "He's feeling much better."

"Good. That's good," Vic said. "I wanted to remind him about getting that money to the church. I don't think he did it, and I don't want it to become a thing where he thinks he can just ease my mind with some words and then shirk his tithe behind my back. Don't think I won't ask Pastor Mooney about it."

"Verne's got a lot on his mind right now..."

"We've all got lots on our minds."

"I know that, Vic. Don't you think I know that? Just... well, I know he's got Thursday off. I'm sure he'll feel better by then. Why don't you talk to him on Thursday, father-to-son, face to face? Clear things up between the two of you about tithes and the church and… anything else."

"And maybe get him to come on our fellowship's hunting trip if he likes that sausage so damn much," Vic chuckled. "I'm lucky I married up."

"You're dang right you are."

Shit. That gave Verne three days to get things figured out. His options were either:

1. Delay indefinitely and never speak to or see his father ever again.
2. Fix his being-a-girl-vampire problem and get back to being the old boy-human Verne by Thursday afternoon.
3. Get his dad to be okay with the being-a-girl-vampire situation.

Of those poor options, Verne didn't know which was the worst. True, his mother had handled the vampire sex-swap situation with admirable aplomb, but Vic Vera was an entirely different beast. As religious as his mother was, she wasn't a hopelessly rigid thinker. Vic, though, was set in his ways to the point that he'd been buying the exact same shoe in the exact same color with the exact same laces since before Verne was born. Verne texted his mother to let her know that he was leaving.

V: <Heading back to my place for a bit, he texted her.
V: <I'm taking a few changes of clothes.
Translation: he was taking some of her clothes that he didn't think she'd terribly miss.

Verne generously applied SPF-50 to all of his exposed skin and donned a Braves baseball cap, pulling his hair through the back in a ponytail. It was a rich, glossy chocolate color with auburn highlights, the high ponytail bobbing down just past his shoulders. Then he donned his sunglasses, crept down the stairs, and snuck out the back. He thought it would be suspenseful, but he could hear every movement his father made. He could even tell what way he was facing based on the little cracks his neck made. And, while Verne could hear every creak and footfall he was making, himself, each was no louder than the gentle taps of his mother's fingertips against the kitchen counter the next room over. He eased the door shut and pulled out his phone.

V: <Hector, bud. I'm gonna be home in a bit if you're in. Word of warning: I look different. Really different.