Chapter Ten: Awkward (Re)Introductions

They rolled into Knoxville around 4 am, at which point the rain had long since stopped. Verne could already see the pale light of dawn fading into the sky in the rear view. It was still too faint for a normal person to pick up, but in five or ten minutes, Maxie would be able to see it. He held his sunglasses at the ready and was already applying SPF 50 to his face and hands.

"Is it that bad?" Maxie asked.

"It's not like in the movies. I don't think a few minutes unprotected would kill me, but I'd burn the hell out of my skin. Maybe there's a better way, but I'm pretty new at this." Verne tugged at his shirt, hoping it wasn't too obvious he wasn't wearing anything underneath it. "Do I look, you know... normal?"

"I'd say you used too much skin cream, but wouldn't peg you for a minion of the night. Text me when you're finished with your friend and I'll be by to pick you up in twenty or thirty, okay?"

"Okay. Thanks a million, Maxie."

They'd parked across the street from Lisa's parent's place on Mulberry Lane. As far as Verne knew, it was an amazing coincidence that the Mulberrys lived on Mulberry Lane and nothing more. Lisa's parents definitely weren't the sort who would have picked an address for the yuks. He stood at the walkway, wondering what to do. When he thought about just sneaking in and creeping up to Lisa's room, a tiny jolt of anxiety twinged within him... vampires ought to be invited inside, his instincts said. But at 4:15 in the morning, what was he going to do? Walk up to the door and knock? That's exactly what he did... almost.

When Verne pulled the screen door open, that spooked Bingo, the Mulberry family's hyperactive corgi, who dashed over to the door and yapped up a storm as Verne waited, unsure whether he should actually knock. A moment later, the porch light came on and Mr. Mulberry pulled the door open enough to poke his head out and squint outside.

"Do you have any idea what time it is?" he whispered. "Who are you? One of Lisa's friends?"

"Um... yeah," Verne said. He wished he'd thought up a good lie beforehand. "I'm going to France for the rest of the summer for, like, a month and my flight leaves at eight. I just found out literally a few hours ago and wanted to see Lisa before I left."

Mr. Mulberry sighed. "She's ill and needs her rest. I'll tell her you visited..."

"I'm Vera. But she already knows I'm coming. Pleeease, Mr. Mulberry?"

He tapped a slippered foot. "If she's already awake and if she wants to talk to you. Wait here."

Shit. Verne pulled out his phone and sent Lisa a flurry of rapid texts.

V: <Pls tell ur dad to let me in
V: <He didn't recognize me
V: <I know u told me not to come

V: <I super promise this is huge

A minute later, Mr. Mulberry trudged back down, opened the door, and wordlessly pointed up the stairs. And an implied invite was just as good as a verbal one, apparently, because Verne felt no twinge of anxiety when stepping inside and making his way up to Lisa's room, where he'd been a hundred times before. Before he slipped into Lisa's room, her father put a hand on Verne's shoulder, whispering:

"Make it fast, ok? Lisa's been through a lot."

+++++

Verne slipped into Lisa's room, closing the door behind him. She was sitting up in bed, rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. He immediately noted the walking cane by her nightstand. Upon the nightstand was an earmarked catalog for motorized wheelchairs.

"Verne, I," she started, soon realizing that her guest wasn't the Verne she knew. "Who the fuck are you?"

"I know this is crazy, but I'm Verne and I can prove it."

"Is this some kind of sick fucking joke?" Lisa hissed. She took in a great draught of breath, preparing to shout at him, or possibly scream. Either way, Verne was pretty sure that Mr. Mulberry was listening nearby.

Verne did the first thing he could think of to prove his bona fides, rushing as quickly as he could (which was incredibly quickly) to the little display of 'get well' flowers and cards on her dresser and grabbing the little paring knife that Lisa's mom had been using to prune the flowers. He plunged the three-inch blade into his forearm, wincing more from the strange sensation of having a knife in his arm than from the flash of pain that welled up and quickly faded to pulsing soreness. He held his pale and slender forearm out for Lisa to see.

"Go on, pull it out," he said.

Hand trembling, Lisa limped the several steps to him and did so. The knife had no blood on it, and the slow thud of Verne's heart pushed no more than a tiny line of inky-dark, resinous blood to the wound. Already, the cut was sealing up. Lisa looked to his arm and then to his face, her eyes uncomprehending. She mouthed the words: what the fuck...  That gave Verne the opening he needed to explain what had happened. He was coming to realize that the best way to explain the incredible to people was to demonstrate the incredible. After seeing the impossible, people tended to be a lot more accepting toward the implausible.

Lisa limped back to her bed and eased herself down, the paring knife still in her hands. She ran her finger along its unblemished blade and back to Verne's arm and its tiny black crease where he'd stabbed himself. Based on his bullet wound from less than a day before, the stab wound would completely heal within an hour or two, leaving no trace whatsoever.

She bit her lip and glanced to her wheelchair catalog. "It healed your NVC?"

"Yeah?" Verne thought about it for a moment. "Or, if not, it doesn't matter. I hardly bleed, and I heal really quickly, so there's no such thing as a mini-stroke. Everything heals up. But, for whatever crazy reason, it turned me into this. Fuck… I could be my own sister, if she took after dad's side of the family. Maybe that's just how vampires work, but it seems really fucking random."

"You're really pretty."

"Thanks. I think," Verne said. "It's probably permanent... so… I'm really sorry. I guess we're breaking up."

Lisa reached out and gently grasped his hand. "We don't have to. I… I'm not sure how this will work. Why don't we figure it out as we go?"

"Yeah," Verne said eventually - inside, though, he was celebrating. He could work with 'watch and wait'. He cleared his throat. "So... do you want me to?"

"Turn me into a vampire?" Lisa said. She shook her head, her dark hair jangling. "No. But I don't want to die from fucking NVC way more. So what choice have I got? I thought I had years before the mini-strokes started, and I've been freaking the fuck out for the past day and a half. I mean... will you be able to live like this?" She gave his hand a little squeeze.

Verne sat next to her on the bed and sighed. "Yeah. Well… I'm not sure whether I'm technically alive, but I think I can. I just need to figure out how to tell my dad, how to get a handle on this whole sunscreen situation... oh yeah, and where to get a pint of human blood every day or two. That part might get tricky. But I don't have to make you a vampire..."

He extruded his fangs and concentrated on the second venom sac in his sinuses – he'd practiced with his venom glands a bit and figured out which ones delivered the vermillion, vampire-making Juvechrome C, which had the golden, opiate-like Juvechrome B, and how to dispense them. He touched a fang and held a ruby-tipped finger out.

"That's Juvechrome C. I can give you the same thing those old rich people pay big money for, and it should keep you healthy."

"Yeah, should," Lisa said. "And you'll have to keep coming back every month or so to re-up my juice supply. And if something happens to you – like if you walk into a church or whatever – I'm fucked. Tell me, 'Vera', have you ever known me to half-ass things?"

"You do not half-ass things, babe."

"I don't," Lisa agreed. "In for a penny, in for a pound. Make me a fucking vampire already."

A minute later, after convincing himself that this was the right thing to do, Verne did just that. He sat cross-legged on Lisa's bed and leaned over, like they were going to kiss. Only, he gently pulled her hair out of the way and leaned in, smelling her scent - lotion, shampoo, perspiration, a hint of corgi, a whiff of medical disinfectant... and, of course, good old human blood. Honing in on that scent triggered an instinct that sent his fangs out, ticked his heart rate up, and had him slavering that strange anticoagulant/coagulent saliva that kept blood flowing right up until it was exposed to air. He nipped at Lisa's neck, savoring her smell before he really bit in.

+++++

He hadn't meant to drink any of Lisa's blood, nor to inject her with any sedative. But, being a vampire, it was just about impossible to resist blood. Tasting vital, delicious, living, nourishing blood, he had to drink it, and Lisa pushing back against him, struggling far too weakly to overcome vampire strength, only stoked the instinct. But Verne never quite lost control. He stopped himself after two or three modest gulps of blood and then pushed venom out. He squeezed as much venom into Lisa as he could... it felt like gallons, but he'd have been very surprised if it equaled the 10 ml of Juvachrome C he'd dosed himself with. And, as his glands emptied, there was a little spillover and Lisa got some sedative, enough to render her loopy and floppy, though she never lost consciousness.

"Woooow," she said, giggling and flopping a hand in front of her face. "I'm, like... wow."

"Did you feel the burn?" Verne asked.

"Yeah," she sighed. "But it's, like, a good burn."

"Only because you got some sedative... I'm told it feels great."

"It does," she said quickly, her eyes starting to droop.

He jostled her. "Don't go to sleep," he said. "Not yet. I have to tell you something really important – it might cause all kinds of trouble if you don't keep it in mind. The venom I injected you with? It's going to kill you..."

"What?" Her eyes shot open, though they still lacked focus.

"When the venom turned me, I died for maybe five hours... lucky for me, it was the middle of the night and nobody checked up to see how I was doing. But I have no idea whether I looked like a corpse, a sleeping person, a vampire cocoon, or what. You're going to feel sick a few times before that as your organs start to turn. Will you be able to figure out a way to deal with that?"

Lisa shrugged lazily. "Guess I'll have to."

"Ok. Good." Verne leaned in and looked into her eyes, sleepy but tracking his gaze for the moment. He realized that this would be the last time he looked into those pretty brown eyes, that this would be the last time he saw Lisa alive. "I love you," he said.

He kissed her, gently and on the lips. It was just like he remembered it, her lips warm and soft, her smile more genuine than any other he'd ever seen. And, as he pulled away, Lisa mumbled, "love you," and drifted off to sleep.

+++++

She'd said she could be by in twenty or thirty minutes, but it was an hour before Maxie managed to swing by to pick Verne up. It was hard to be too mad – she'd just driven Verne, whom she hardly knew, from Palmetto all the way to Knoxville in the middle of the night on a lark. Verne skulked in the Mulberrys' little foyer as the sun intensified outside – even if Mr. Mulberry ordered him outside, Verne wasn't sure being disinvited could compel him out into the sunlight. He'd rather have a panic attack inside. But Mr. Mulberry had gone back to sleep and nobody was there to evict Verne from the foyer, so he applied his sunscreen and dawdled, experimenting with the waxing morning light, exposing his limbs to the little shafts of golden sunlight streaming in.

Without any protection, his skin burned pinkish-purple within five or six seconds, painfully blistering after fifteen or twenty. Fortunately, those blisters went away within ten minutes or so once he took them out of the light. With SPF 50, it was a full minute before his skin tingled in pain and turned colors, blistering slightly around the four minute mark, and with SPF 100 stolen from the Mulberrys' bathroom, he left his arm in a shaft of light for five full minutes with some discoloration but no hint of blistering, at which point Maxie texted him to come outside. So that was good news – with decent protection, he could be in full sunlight for at least a few minutes, provided he didn't mind his skin turning the garish hue of a six-hour bruise, and even that would fade quickly. Finding decent shades to block out the sunlight would have to wait.

When Maxie finally pulled up in her golden-brown Volvo, she had a passenger, a strikingly pretty black woman with a dozen tiny flowers in her hair. Verne crouched by the passenger window and shook the woman's hand. They were soft and warm, and she shook and smiled with the poise of royalty.

"Vera, this is Eva. She'll be coming back with us to Palmetto."

"Her aura's very dark," Eva whispered.

"I'm a vampire," Verne explained, and he climbed into the back seat, moving their bags into the foot well. "A sleepy vampire. Mind if I crash?"

"Crash away," Maxie said, "you've had a long day. Er... night."

However much sleep vampires needed, it wasn't eight hours... but, fittingly enough, they slept like the dead. When Verne roused, they were perhaps half-way back to Palmetto city and Maxie was dozing away in the passenger's seat. He rustled around and peeked out from under his protective covering of blanket, squinting at the late morning light despite his sunglasses. How could people stand so much light? He unzipped his backpack and started reapplying sunscreen – he'd heard you were supposed to do that every two hours or so. Fortunately, there wasn't a whole lot to cover: hands, ankles, face, and ears. Everything else was pretty well-covered by hair and clothes.

Eva noticed him, glancing up in the rear view mirror, the sponge curls of her hair and their little white flowers fringed like a crown around the Volvo's headrest. Her dark eyes took him in.

"So you're a vampire?" she asked.

Verne shrugged. "Seems that way. And what are you?"

"Complicated."

"Aren't we all? I'm guessing Wicca shamanic something-something?"

Her eyes squinted. A smile? No, she was serious. "Don't let Maxie hear you say that. I been driving a long time already, Vera – Memphis to Knoxville all last night, and right on over to Palmetto now. Listen, Vera, I got nothing against you personally... a couple of kids who enjoy a pint of red in the evenings? There's a lot worse than that out there, and most of the bad is plain old ugly humans. But sometimes it isn't..."

"Evil vampire death cults and the like."

"You get me," she nodded. "Might be there's nothing to it. A couple of vampires looking to make easy money..."

"I don't think it is," Verne said.

"Me either. And I'm fixing to do something about it. I'm fixing to kill some vampires."

Verne shrugged. "They're no friends of mine."

OvidLemma

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