Chapter 6

Kiran

I woke up warm in a way I’d not felt before. I snuggled in closer to the feeling, slowly realizing what the source was. I was cuddling a person. I'd never been this close with someone before. It felt so new, but also like something I was born to do. Damn this was a good feeling.

I shifted myself so my chest and stomach pressed snugly into the person's back. Then everything got cold and I heard a muffled thump.

That was enough to fully wake me up.

“Huh?” I said, sitting up and rubbing my eyes.

Shit!

As seemed to be the trend, a wealth of memories of the previous day rushed back to me as I got my bearings.

Meg was now face down on the floor in front of me.

I got on my knees and flipped her over.

“Are you okay?”

Her eyes were still closed. She wasn’t moving.

“Shit shit shit shit!”

I put two fingers up to her neck. Thank goodness. She had a pulse.

“Meg, wake up!”

I pushed on her arm gently at first, but she was unresponsive. I began to shake her, eventually becoming borderline violent in my attempts to wake her up. Meg stayed comatose on the floor.

It got to the point where I was shaking her so hard that I worried I’d be hurting her and just shrunk back.

Somehow I’d done this to her. I knew it. I felt around my head and back, no sign of the horns or wings.

Had I made those up too?

Fucking hell, what was real anymore!?

“Help! Please!”

I started shouting through the tears. It took a second or two but eventually someone came in. Again it wasn’t long before RAs showed up. Then an ambulance and the police.

It was different police than yesterday, and they didn’t seem to realize I was the same person since it was a different dorm across campus.

I could barely give them my statement through the tears, shock, and guilt.

I told them an approximation of what happened. We ran into each other at the dining hall, she walked me back, we had sex, and went to bed on the futon. When I woke up she was unresponsive. No, there were no drugs involved. (Thank goodness she didn’t have any drugs in her room.)

I watched as they picked her up, put her on a stretcher, and wheeled her out.

I watched as the ambulance pulled out of the parking lot with its lights off. This wasn’t even an emergency. They weren't in a rush to get her anywhere, because there was nothing to be done.

Meg's body was breathing, her heart was beating, but in my soul I knew that she was gone.

I stood. Suddenly, I was completely alone again, watching from the quad as the ambulance drove out of view.

So I walked back to my dorm, without any company in the mid-morning crowd.

Everyone around me had their lives. People passed. Groups chatted. Many stuck to themselves and whatever was coming out of their headphones. They all had a class they had to arrive at on time or a plans to grab breakfast and study. Everyone had a next thing, a purpose.

I was without one, existentially aimless.

The warmth inside hadn't entirely vanished, and it made me sick. The disadence between what I felt physically and emotionally was too much too process. So I shut all of it out. I wanted to float away, unable to feel anything.

Then I came to my building. Suddenly I was real again, grounded in a place. It spiked my anxiety. For a second, walking for so long, I'd been able to drift away from myself. Having arrived, I was tethered to being me again and all the things that came with it.

I wrote a shitty three-sentence email that I copy and pasted to all of my professors. There was no way I was going to class.

As I walked into my dorm I sent Audry a few texts.

 

Kira: Hey. Something happened. I’m okay, but it's really really messed me up. I’m gonna take a nap. I’ll call you when I wake up.

She thumbs-up’ed the message.

Audry: Okay. I’m worried, so keep me in the loop, please.

I “loved” her message and put my phone on its charger.

 

Matt was still out, so I pulled the blanket up and slept off the trauma as best as I could.

I had tumultuous sleep for a few hours. I got up, went to the dining hall, ate as much as I could muster, walked back, and went back to bed. I wasn't hungry and the food didn't make me full. It sat ambivalently on my stomach as I drifted back to sleep.

Lots of the day was simply me lost in half-asleep, half-awake self-pity. My phone buzzed the whole time.

 

Audry: Are you awake?

Audry: Are you okay?

Audry: Hey, I’m worried. You’re freaking me out.

Audry: I saw something about a girl in a coma on the news. Was that you? What happened? What did you tell the cops?

 

I watched them all come in, but couldn't summon the emotional energy to respond. So they dinged and dinged. My anxiety would peak, I'd convince myself back into apathy, and then a new message would restart the cycle. I knew I was hurting someone close to me every time an unanswered message came in. What words did I have to convey just how complicated fucked up I felt? I couldn't piece it apart enough to fully understand, much less be able to explain it to someone else. But my phone kept making noises and sounds. Eventually, the guilt hit a breaking point and I responded.

 

Kira: Can I come over?

Audry: Yes! Of course! Are you okay?

Kira: I’m coming over.

 

I threw on a jacket too light for the cold but decided to let the chill maybe wake me up a bit. I started the walk to the parking lot about 7 minutes away.

The cold had combated the sickening warmth, but it left me paranoid. It was only so long before the police or someone else put everything together and realized what I'd done.

I’d done this walk a million times and always looked out for other people or cars, but my mind was wired. Every little leaf that fell or person across the street was inspected. I looked over my shoulder a few times, for whatever reason.

The third time I looked I saw a person behind me. I picked up my pace, fast walking towards the well-lit parking lot, but first I had to cross the street and that meant waiting for the stop light.

Shit.

The person behind me hadn’t matched my pace but was quickly approaching. Intellectually, they were just another pedestrian headed to their car or the soccer fields nearby. In a more primal instinctual place, something about the person rubbed me the wrong way.

Shit. Shit shit shit.

Were they staring at me? Fuck. Okay. I’ll just take a selfie with them in the background and I’ll be able to see if they’re looking at me.

I took out my phone and as nonchalant as I could manage aimed the camera at myself for a selfie. But the person wasn’t there. I whipped around to see if my camera was making things up.

Thank goodness it wasn’t.

But where did they go?

This was so fucking weird. My heart started beating so fast I could feel it behind my eyes.

There was no one around in the visible distance. Maybe they were hiding behind a bush, but something told me they were just gone.

The second the light turned I straight up sprinted to my car. Adrenaline pumped through me like I was prey and the stranger was a predator about to pounce at any moment. I fumbled with the keys, but got the car moving and roared onto the road. There weren’t any cops on the road to Audry’s, which was good because I would have definitely gotten a ticket.

I pulled up to Audry’s gate and she buzzed me in.

The beating in my head got stronger the closer I got to the apartment. Flashbacks to pinpricks of pain in my back and head.

I parked probably horribly and attempted to catch my breath, not realizing it was almost knocked out of me.

I opened my door, but closed it again.

I wasn’t sure if I could go back in there. Something about the smell of this place... I was panicking hardcore.

Knock!

I screamed.

“Hey, hey hey hey hey. It’s me. You’re okay.” It was Audry.

I threw open the door and dissolved into her grasp. She couldn’t necessarily support my weight so we both just sank down and leaned against my car, me completely draped over her.

She gently ran her fingers through my hair as best she could given how tangled and messy it was.

We sat like this for at least five minutes, probably more like ten before I could get a word out.

“I’m so scared…”

“Hey, I’m here with you. Nothing is going to happen.”

“You… Y— you don’t know that.”

“Why? What’s wrong? I can’t help if you don’t let me in.”

I felt my heartbeat in my temple as the sobs returned.

“You wouldn’t believe me.”

“Hey,” she grabbed my face and gently but forcefully me to look her in the eyes, “I’m always gonna be on your side. If you say it happened, then it happened.”

“I… can’t.” More sobs. “I’m not crazy, I swear I’m not crazy.”

Audry to her credit, wrapped her arms tightly around me.

Many breaths later I managed a real statement.

“I think I killed someone.”

“How do you think?”

“She still had a pulse.” Fuck this was hard to talk about.

“Then you didn’t kill them.” She didn’t understand.

“But I— I took her soul or something. I dunno, fuck!”

“How could you take her soul?”

In. Out. In. Out…

“Over the weekend, when we played Murder in the Dark.”

“This has to deal with you being drunk? Kira, you didn’t do anything embarrassing.”

“I wasn’t drunk.” I finally found the strength to look her in the eyes on my own, the tears fading as I felt the gravity of the situation forcing seriousness over me. “I think I was murdered.”

“But you’re right here, very clearly alive.”

“I’m different.”

“What?”

“Before this weekend, I had a guy’s body. Now I have this body.”

“That’s not…” She furrowed her brow and I could see her thinking. “But—”

“You remember!”

“No. I— You’ve always looked…”

“My name was Kiran, not Kira.” That felt really weird to say.

“What does this have to do with killing someone?”

“I think when I died, I got brought back. Some sort of ritual. I don’t remember much. Lots of fire. Chanting. Then I woke up in my bed. Like this. I think…”

Here we go. I hadn't even admitted some of this to myself.

“I think I got turned into a demon.”

Audry looked me up and down. I could see the gears clicking.

“Audry I think you were there. You have to remember. Please!”

“I— I think I do remember.”

“Yes! Thank you.” I hugged her super tight.

“The fire. You were… I couldn’t move to stop them. Woah. Kira, what happened to you?”

Finally, the tears rolling down my cheek were happy ones.

“I don’t know, but at least I’m not the only one who remembers.”

“I remember. I remember…”

Brianna

I found something. A girl.

I smelled her when she woke up and positioned myself close by.

She exited and I started following her. After two years, I tended to not get noticed when I followed someone, but this girl… she noticed. She tried to catch me on her phone. Another thing two years as a vampire had taught me was just how fast I could move. She was far enough away to mistake my speed for nothing but the breeze but if she were closer, I would definitely have been clocked.

How had she noticed me?

And then she drove right over to the apartment complex. Once I knew her smell, I didn’t need to stay in visual range to follow her, I could stay out of sight, going fast enough with my speed to keep up. Then I hovered in the woods, listening.

This, more than anything, cemented my suspicions. I watched and listened as she talked with the second girl, who was the one leaving the complex a day or so ago when my trail went cold.

More puzzle pieces fell into place. I had fixated on her scent. The blood I had smelled was from the girl I'd followed. She’d been murdered or killed. But the scents didn't entirely match. There was the subtlest of differences between the original blood and the girl's now. Perhaps someone else's blood had been spilled, but not enough to be lethal? I thought back to my own making. I drank the blood of another in order to be changed.

It was all lining up.

I had no doubt that she was a victim, much like I had been. She had likely been made, but that was where doubt crept back in.

She wasn’t a vampire. That much I was sure of. She wouldn’t be wondering whether she’d killed someone. She would be sure. But more importantly, I’d spent plenty of time around vampires. I knew what their heavy back-of-your-mind presence felt like. I felt them as a rival predator lurking nearby, challenging me.

This girl was less than that. I felt her presence, but it was more similar to prey. She was as helpless as any other my kind fed on.

And yet she certainly wasn’t human.

The vampiric predator was gone but she was still somehow otherworldly. Perhaps she was a thrall? I’d only come across thralls during that night before I was made so maybe that’s what thralls felt like to the fully initiated? But that didn’t feel right. I should have felt some element of control or connection to a thrall, even if they weren't my own.

Who, and more importantly what, was this girl?