It only took a moment. In one fluid motion, my hand reached behind my head and pulled a pillow protectively between my vital areas and the knife. 

Unfortunately, in doing so, I put my arm in danger’s path, allowing the knife to run all the way down to the artery with sickening ease. 

A searing pain and spurting blood erupted, but I had no time to scream. The girl was attacking me again, silent and expressionless, her stony cold stare knowing nothing mercy. My dominant right was rendered useless, and she had gravity on her side as she had plunged knife toward my neck again.

 I dodged this time and bit into her wrist, causing her to recoil. I used the opportunity to throw her off before desperately escaping, adrenaline pumping and blood flowing far too quickly. It was blinding, spraying through the gaps in my fingers as I tried to hold it closed. Soon it would be lethal. My breaths were quick and shallow, while hers were measured and calm, as though belonging to a natural killer. The knife,now stained, was still in her hands while I had nothing. Worse still, she was by the door, blocking the only meaningful escape. It was her fight to win. My only hope was not to fight it.

“Why are you doing this?”

I squeezed out between panicked breaths.

“Quiet”, she said, brandishing the knife.

“Why should I be? You’re killing me for no apparent reason, and expect me not to speak or even complain? You’re making it very hard for me to negotiate.”

“I have no need to bargain with a monster.”

“Ah, but that assumes I am a monster, that I carry bad intentions. It pleases me to say that I am not. I’m a human being, and harmless as can be.”

“I don’t believe you.”

This goddamn appearance. If I made it out of this alive, I was going to strangle whoever thought this was a good idea.

“Even if you don’t, you can see that I’m intelligent, that I’m capable of speech and rational thought. Do you really hold so much animosity toward me that you’d enjoy seeing my figure lying bled out on the floor?”

I saw her resolve waver, but it wasn’t enough.

“I’ll do whatever is necessary to survive. Prove to me that it isn’t a ruse and I’ll consider it.”

How the hell did she expect me to prove my innocence while my arm was leaking enough blood to paint a house? Also, what had I done to warrant stabbing?

“Why do you mean ‘consider it’? My life is at stake here! Don’t you feel any guilt barging into my house and stabbing me? If I’m so threatening to you, why didn’t you avoid me entirely? ‘Survival’? To use your own words, I don’t believe you.”

“Shut up! It wasn’t supposed to be like this! You’re a monster. I was supposed to kill you in a single blow and move on with my life, so why are you making this so difficult?”

She began advance again and I was backed into a corner. My mind swarmed with a million retorts.

“Look at yourself. Coated in another’s blood while calling me a monster. What do you know about being human?”

I wanted to scream these words vindictively, although I mostly wanted to scream in general. But I could not. The more agitated she became, the less likely I was to survive. 

So I threw out words to buy some time.

“I’m human and I can prove it.”

She paused, thankfully, but then I had to face the reality that I had nothing to back up those words. I was bleeding out. My head was starting to hurt, and my breathing was slowing. 

Perhaps a bit of the old “throw your dignity out the window” trick was in order.

“Please, help me. I’ll give you whatever you want. Food, water, anything. I even have some gold.”

That last part was a lie, although I did have some valuable cabinetry. 

She, however, seemed to have come to a realization.

“You’re telling the truth, aren’t you?

She was asking a question as if it were a statement, but it was to my advantage, so I didn’t mind.

“Yes.”

Finally, she dropped the knife. But then,to my dismay, her emotions swung the other direction. Her countenance paled and her hands began to tremble.

“ Oh no, what have I done?”

If you were this sensitive, why did you stab me in the first place!

No, that wasn’t fair. She was crying now,  and clearly overwhelmed.

It just happened that her remorsefulness was rather ineffective when it came to treating knife related injuries.

“Ahem.”

I cleared my throat and began to administer instructions.

“Listen closely, ok. I’m not a medical expert, but I know enough to confidently say that my life is still salvageable. But for me to make it, I’m going to need your help, alright?”

She nodded and collected herself to some extent. At least enough to stop her trembling.

“I’m going to need you to cut up some cloth into strips as long as you can make them while keeping them no wider than your hand. Can you do that?“

“Yes”

She got to work and I sat down, still applying pressure to my wound. God, it hurt like hell. I was breathing through my teeth and sweating and wishing she could get done faster. Internally, however, I knew that what she was about to do would not provide relief. My voice was clear and steady even as my heart was not.

“Do you know how to tie a square knot?”

“No?”

“That’s ok, it’s really easy. You just take the two leftover ends after tying a regular knot, cross them in the opposite direction, and pull it tight.”

I could see by her face that I wasn’t getting through to her.

“You know what, never mind. Just tie the cloth around the wound as tightly as possible and use the ends to make a shoelace knot.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes! Now do it, quickly!”

I removed my hand and blood poured out. It was staggering how much had left already. I tried not to think about it, instead directing my energy toward my voice.

“Pull!”

With both hands, she pulled the cloth tight  around my arm and put me through so much pain my vision swam. I clenched my left hand so strongly my fingernails cut part of my palm. But I could see the hesitation on her face and the gentleness of her hands, and so I shouted.

“Harder!l

She certainly obeyed. I nearly fainted then and there, but through will alone I pulled through, gasping. It hadn’t even registered that she forgot to preserve the tension afterward, allowing the knot she had so painfully tied to simply slip away.

As strained as I was to not give up, I barely had the heart in me to tell her to do it again.

This, I had decided, was not going to be a good day.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“Keep talking, it keeps me distracted and alert”.

The worst thing you can do after a traumatic injury is fall asleep, and my body was very persuasive in its efforts to do just that. 

“Sure. . . Are you alright? You don’t look very well.”

No! I wasn’t!You stabbed me! Or did you already forget?

“I’m doing alright. If you see me begin to slouch, slap me. I need to stay awake.”

“Got it.”

To be honest, she wasn’t looking so good herself.  Her clothes were old and worn and hung loosely on her frame, as though she had been starving. But more importantly, I recognized them as being made of the same polyester fabrics I had worn in the past.

“So what’s your story?”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Sydney was used to waking up in the dark. She had done it every day since she was ten years old, kicked out from one foster home after another until she finally landed at the st. Anthony’s orphanage. There, due to low donations and little in the way of government funding, electricity was deemed too steep an expense, and so the well meaning clergy had long decided to cut it. It awful, at first, but she got used to it. The trick lied in waking up all at once. Much worse was the apathy and the lack of guidance. The priests were concerned, yes, but not loving in the way a parent ought to be. They had too many things to worry about to take care of her as an individual,

She learned take care of herself, to handle her own emotional needs, but doing so was not without cost.

For her, it took the joy of childhood. She was mature beyond her years but lacking the wisdom of a well rounded adult, which could lead to some strange results. At eleven years old, she had the foresight to begin taking control of her own future. Her method of doing so was training to become a sculptor, doing pushups and sit-ups and squats for a full twenty minutes every day.

She did not really have a good idea of what a sculptor was, back then, only that she was committed to becoming one.

But that’s beside the point. The point is that she, sixteen years old and having recently shown enthusiasm for wine tasting, went missing. Nobody knew where she went or why, and so, after a few half hearted search attempts and missing posters, people simply accepted it .

The few people who knew her at the orphanage assumed she had simply run away, that she had made some ill considered plan and executed it without telling anybody. 

It was true that she was making preparations for a surprise party about two weeks off of any upcoming birthdays, but that was a coincidence and wholly unrelated to her disappearance.

For her, it was an ordinary day as she walked home from the office supplies store at six o’clock in the evening. She had been there looking for balloons, and was disappointed to discover that they had none in stock. So now, she was stuck walking home and kicking cans off the too narrow sidewalk as she listened to the symphony of honks emanating from the nearby rush hour traffic.

The office supplies store was, understandably, close to a highway and not really meant to accommodate pedestrians. As such, litter accumulated from the roadside and no one bothered to pick it up. It got to the point that every passed by at least a dozen cigarette butts and piled plastic bags. 

If you had been there to take photographs of the dreary faces of commuters through their vehicle windows, of the endless expanse of grey and black asphalt lit by headlights or the small act of rage a poor girl preformed as she kicked a can into the sea of metal cars, you would surely come out with a picturesque display of the impact of urbanization on America’s once beautiful land...

To Sydney, however, this walk was no special occasion, nor was there anything to condemn about the filthiness of the street. It was just how things were, in the same way that water was wet or night was dark.

Well, it wasn’t really dark because of the light pollution, but the point stands.

She took the unpleasantness of her environment for granted, such that she hardly noticed it was there at all. To her, this was “normal”. And it would have been for the rest of her life. But that day, for reason no one knows, she stopped in her path and looked up from the sidewalk, as though she had heard someone call her name.

If you had been lucky enough to witness it, you would see her get knocked down by some invisible force. And miraculously, in the moment before she hit the ground, she was gone.

By the time she came to, she was in the midst of a vast, pitch black forest.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

The smell of nature was unfamiliar to Sydney. Although she knew of dirt, it was the kind that came from automobiles. The dirt here was different, vibrant and alive and lacking that usual air of sootiness.

It also smelled dangerous. 

Sydney had always trusted in her senses. It was what allowed her to walk alone at night with confidence or hurry past areas where she believed disaster would strike. 

She was no survivalist, having rarely seen more than two trees at once, but she knew when she could and couldn’t stay.

She could tell she wasn’t welcome, although by what she was not sure. So she got a move on, feeling around as she had always done in the darkness of her mornings. The sense of urgency persisted, looming over her and hastening her steps until she came across a cottage with a warm inviting scent and a promise of safety.

There was no one there, of course, but there was a plate of cookies. She took a bite but immediately spit it out: something was unusual. Not necessarily toxic, but certainly not edible and possessing of any number of potential side effects. Or so her nose told her.

Which left her at something of a loss. She wasn’t tired enough to want to use the bed, nicely prepared as it was, so she just sat down on the stool that was provided and began to hum a little tune that had been taught in her time at the orphanage.  And then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw it.

The darkness underneath the bed began to spread out like water on a sidewalk and coalesce into a shape. She could only watch in horror as it began to move, defying physics as it broke free from the floor and the other shadows to occupy three dimensional space. It wasn’t very large: the darkness took the form a many legged insect about the size of a cat. Still, Sydney was paralyzed as she watched it crawl up the table’s leg and approach the cookies. In a moment of inspiration and no small amount of panic, she threw the plate outside and the creature with it. She quickly and securely shut the door and contemplated what she had just seen. Or perhaps, more accurately, failed to contemplate it. No amount of thinking she applied would allow her to explain... that, so she moved on to something more productive: getting the hell out of there. Where there was one freaky insect thing, there was bound to be more, or so she told herself. 

With all the fervor of a second grader at a slightly too realistic haunted house, she walked out of the cabin and tripped face first.  She had not expected a drop to be there. When she looked up, she could see the crater that had been carved fifteen feet across. It was only about two feet deep where she stood, but the epicenter went down almost nine. And she was pretty sure the deepest part landed exactly where she had thrown the plate of cookies. Which had some disturbing implications.

Had that little critter caused all this damage? Or did something even bigger come out to eat it? 

Sydney did not like either option. And the feeling of repulsion coming from the environment had intensified, as though each and every branch were screaming at her “ G O  A W A Y” .

That, she could do.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Sydney’s first stroke of good luck, if it could be considered good, came at the price of the contents of her stomach. Though she had been walking for what must have been hours, the ominous feeling had never ceased, leaving her anxious and exhausted by the time she finally caught the telltale scent of cookies. She was confused why another cottage even existed, but sought after it nonetheless. 

One of the quirks that made these structures so difficult to find was the degree to which they contained light. A normal building would have at least a crack between the doorway and the floor, but these wood cottages were so precisely designed that no such gap existed, leaving Sydney blind as ever as she searched for the cottage. 

She finally  knocked and heard a hollow sound, and was introduced to her first batch of good luck: pinned to the wall opposite of the door was a man with dozens of kitchen knives piercing his arms and legs, as though someone had a particularly sick idea of crucifixion. Even in death, he was left standing: the executioner had been so excessive there was no slack despite the human’s body weight. But Sydney wasn’t really repulsed. Surprised, certainly, but she knew what blood smelled like and the body in front of her was empty. A realistic doll, she decided. The trick meant to scare her away had actually presented her with a lucky opportunity. If she could just get the knife, she’d have a tool to defend herself or hunt. In her mind, it wasn’t even a decision. She grabbed the knife from the body a little too roughly, causing it to dislodge from the wall and fall on top of her. This wouldn’t have been a problem if it had been an effigy as she imagined, but it’s surface held the unmistakable texture of human skin...

Needless to say, she vomited. An atrocity had been committed, one horrific as it was impossible. She didn’t even want to know  the details of how a bloodless, scentless corpse could possibly be created, so she instead chose to toss it into the fireplace and forget it ever existed. 

At least she had a knife now.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

“Hya!”

Sydney struck her knife at the scuttling shadow bug, but was a fraction of a second too slow. The lack of cat sized holes didn’t seem to impede the creature as it jumped into the wall and disappeared from the third dimension. Another failure.

She picked up the knife in disappointment. The cottages were getting rarer, and only a fraction held the shadow bugs she depended on as her food source. The bright side was the access to clean water: as soon as the environment grew  little dryer, small wooden bowls began appearing filled with water within the cabins. She was also impressed with the meat of the critters, which were shockingly nonpoisonous if a little bland. Unfortunately, her hunts only succeeded one in three times, which was not a lot when she encountered two bugs a day at most. She just grieved the loss of all the cookies that she was forced to pass by. Life would be made so much easier if they were edible.

Alas, there was nothing to be done. The cabins were getting few and far between, and she was getting hungrier every day. As it was, she was just walking around randomly and scavenging for food without making any definitive progress. The light of day had not come in at least a week, and there was no guarantee that it would come at all. And though Sydney has not come across any more brutalized corpses, she was beginning to wonder if that wasn’t because they were being eaten before they could be seen. If that was the case, it was only a matter of time before the creature responsible came across her, at which point no amount of knives would keep her safe.

Things could not go on like this, she decided, so she made herself a plan. Whenever walking out of a building, she would puncture a hole in the door and walk a straight the opposite direction. This way, she would never enter the same building twice. In the meantime, she could use the marked doors to develop landmarks, and eventually, a sense of the forest’s geography.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The journey to the house in front of her was more dangerous than anything she had faced before, such that she was forced to spend her first night without sleep. At certain parts, the sense of fear would grow so strong she could only sit absolutely still and wait for the danger to pass. Even then, a deeper instinct told her to be cautious, so she was. 

A part of it was exhilarating. With her knife in hand and eyes wide open, she went walking through the dark with the knowledge that each moment could be her last. 

That feeling had not worn off even though she had technically made it to safety.

The house in front of her was set apart from the others by the way it seemed to feel no need to conceal itself. Looming ominously in a dark clearing, it was three stories tall with glowing windows so large the entire courtyard was cast an imposing orangish yellow.  In the dark of the forest, its influence could be seen from half a mile away.  To a desperate individual, Sydney was sure it would seem like an oasis in the desert.

To her, it seemed like the perfect trap for light-starved humans. 

She could still turn back, she knew. The surrounding woods were dangerous, and completely empty of cabins, but she could  make the journey as long she proceeded with caution. By contrast, there was no telling what could happen in the manor should she enter.

But Sydney was never one to turn down an opportunity once offered, even one laced with ill intent. And so into the jaws of the beast she went. 

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Sydney made a stealthy entrance. Well, as stealthy an entrance as one can make when opening a giant set of double doors with hinges that probably date back to the french revolution.  She visibly cringed at the echoing creak, only to be surprised when the disaster she was anticipating did not come. Perhaps this was less dangerous than she had thought.

She had only been in one other fancy building before: a museum at the Smithsonian she was taken to by one of her more well off foster homes. That same influence was here as well: a dusty, wooden scent that emanated from the mahogany walls. Like the building hadn’t been in use for ages. It was in complete contradiction to the spotless floors which appeared as though they had been cleaned just yesterday.

Disturbed but not cowed, she moved on into the hallway on the right. She was struck by the bizarre choice of decoration: picture frames, all empty and seemingly randomly dispersed.Had the portraits been removed, or had they always been that way? At the end of the hallway was a barely opened door, which she approached to better hear the soft breathing from within. Curious, she opened the door and saw it’s contents. It was a room not too dissimilar from the cabins that were her hunting grounds: a heath on the left, a bed against the center wall, and a little night stand where there would normally be cookies. Of course, this one was much more spacious, and the bed and fire were accordingly massive. But Sydney got no further in her observations before she was struck by a familiar smell.

Despite her best effort to actively forget about it, Sydney still remembered the body. The way it slumped over onto her, perfectly preserved. As though it were a hunting trophy, taxidermied for the enjoyment of some well to do fellow who thought nothing of it. Who rested peacefully with  a clear conscience even as the scent of blood stained their lips. Her instincts sensed no danger from the little girl in front of her, but instincts could be fooled. Why else take the form of a little girl if not to be disarming?

No, the monster in front of her might well be older than she was. That silver hair and  pale complexion and most of all the scent of blood was evidence enough that this creature was a vampire.

One that just happened to be vulnerable in the presence of a woman with a knife.

Between removing a threat in front of her and ignoring it, was there even a decision?

She braced herself and silently prepared to do what she knew had to be done.