We finally reached my building, then my apartment. At least I had remembered to close and lock my door despite my fears to the contrary.
I unlocked the door, fingers trembling, letting the weight of the moment trail behind me like a second shadow. The walls pressed inward, the stillness sharp as broken glass. My sanctuary wasn’t safe anymore – I had let a wolf in with me.
I grabbed the pepper spray as I reached for the light, thinking myself rather clever for how smoothly I had done both tasks so that I could hide the spray from Michael. It felt good to hold onto the cool, reassuring plastic. Something real. Unlike the rest of this night. The click of the deadbolt echoed like a gavel in a courtroom where I was the only juror and he, the strange, guilty defendant with fangs.
I motioned him over to the small couch, grabbing a chair from the table for myself and setting it across the coffee table from him.
Sitting down, I noticed how small this large man looked when he was so dejected. It was odd to see him like that when he was so bubbly and loud at work.
I stuck with clarifying for now. I sat forward, “So, vampires are real?”
“Yeah.”
“And you are one?”
“Yeah.”
That sentence shouldn't make sense. And yet there we were, me, my tiny couch, and the undead guy who asked me for spreadsheet access twelve hours ago.
An awkward pause fell over us again. I continued to struggle believing what I had seen and heard. I glanced between the window and the door, wondering which would be a better escape route, praying to the universe that I wouldn’t need one.
You’re the idiot who let a vampire into your home, why are you looking for escape routes now?
I shook my head to clear it. “But there’s no way there are actual vampires. That’s all fairy tales and magic and things that go bump in the night. If you’re a vampire, show me your teeth.”
They had looked odd just before he had started biting Kelsey.
Michael shrugged and bared his teeth to me, holding his lip back with a finger.
I leaned forward, trying to figure out what made his teeth look different earlier. Right now they looked normal to me, not like how they were at Kelsey’s.
“How do the teeth work? You’re not going around wearing fangs all the time so there’s got to be some mechanism for it.”
“My canines elongate and sharpen into points.” He demonstrated. My heart kicked like a trapped rabbit. I barely held my scream.
He retracted his teeth. “Have you ever heard about how a venomous snake’s teeth work?”
I shook my head, completely unfamiliar with this random turn of conversation. I was confused what it had to do with vampires at all.
“Venomous snakes have hollow, needle-like teeth, kind of like a hypodermic needle. The difference is that snake teeth deposit venom while my teeth act more like straws. Normally, the process isn’t as messy as you saw earlier. Something is seriously wrong with me tonight. I haven’t been this thirsty in a very long time. I had spent just enough time with Kelsey tonight to be able to hypnotize her like you saw, and I could see the pulse on her neck. Seeing it…” his eyes widened, “It was like putting steak in front of a starving man – I couldn’t resist.”
He sighed, his countenance falling even further. “It’s been a very long day.”
Preaching to the choir, brother.
He wouldn’t meet my eyes. His hands hovered in front of him, twitching like they didn’t know what to do anymore – reach out for comfort or cover his face in shame. The blood had been wiped away, but guilt still clung to him like a second skin.
“How I am at work,” he looked me in the eyes, “It’s a mask. I act all happy-go-lucky and like nothing could bother or stop me, but that’s not what I’m like most of the time. I guess you could call me an extroverted introvert, someone who can be extroverted when necessary but would rather not deal with anybody else the rest of the time.”
“When I’m not at work, I’m usually completely alone and perfectly content with it. I occasionally go out with others but that’s not a regular thing for me.”
My head was swimming around this new information, struggling to absorb everything that Michael was telling me.
Wait, he’s not always so peppy and annoying? He actually prefers silence too? Who is this man and what has he done with Michael Anderson?
I was still getting over the fact that vampires exist at all. And I had been working with one and now training one for how long? How many other vampires were there out there? How does a person even become a vampire?
I only had more and more questions and sorting them into coherent thoughts was a struggle.
I tried to think. “Are you dead then?”
“Technically, I am “dead…” I think,” he punctuated with his fingers, “But the term “undead” makes more sense since I’m not a rotting corpse. I guess it would be easier if I started at the beginning.”
Michael shifted on the couch, as if settling in before beginning his tale.
“In short, I’m not exactly sure how I became a vampire. I was out for a drive and I remember seeing oncoming lights and trying to swerve.”
“Then there was only darkness and stillness, a kind that I can’t really describe in a proper way, no matter how much I think about it, and I don’t like to. Far off, I could see a pinpoint of light. It wasn’t warmth that approached, it was inevitability.”
“I knew that I was dying and I knew I didn’t want to die. I started bargaining and praying and pleading in the darkness.”
“A disembodied voice drifted to me, not from the light, but from behind me. It was low, almost musical. It asked if I wanted to live.”
“I told it I’d give anything, I was desperate. A bargain that rewrote my soul. And next thing I knew I was waking up beside my totaled car.”
Michael sat back, heaving another sigh and rubbing a hand over his eyes and face.
I blinked a couple of times, dumbfounded.
“...That’s it? You died and then heard a voice and then didn’t die? That makes absolutely no sense, you know that right?”
Disbelief colored my face.
He has to be hiding something; his story is too vague.
“You’re a vampire, I’ll give you that, but what kind of weak-ass origin story is that? What did you give up to not die?”
A groan from Michael, “I don’t know. I obviously gave up something or else I wouldn’t be here, but what it was I haven’t the foggiest.” He twisted on the couch, seeming too big on the small loveseat. “But you interrupted my story, and rather rudely I might add. Don’t call it “weak-ass” without a little more context.”
I raised my brows at his tone and gestured for him to continue, trying to hide how scared I felt.
Please don’t get mad and eat me!
He shifted in his seat once more. “That was last autumn, so it's been a little less than a year. I learned pretty quickly that I needed blood.”
“The guy in the other car, an overtired driver I later learned, was passed out but more or less fine.”
“As I was coming to, all I could think of was how thirsty I felt. I went to check on the other driver, not knowing if there were any other survivors or casualties.”
He played with his hands as if he couldn’t think of anything else to do with them. Or he was fidgeting. I tried to focus on his story instead of his presence for the moment.
“His head was lolled toward the passenger seat and I checked for a pulse. After feeling that pulse under my fingers, that dire thirst rushed forward again, almost unbearable this time.”
“And his pulse felt… Well, it felt delicious. It's frustrating that I don’t have another word I can think of, but that is the closest descriptor I can come up with: delicious.”
“My new instinct immediately took over and I drank his blood. It was a really odd sensation at first, the drinking itself, how it felt having his blood course through my teeth and into my body.”
He bit him?! Is he going to bite me too?
“I started to become aware of myself and I recoiled from him as quickly as I could. Like you saw tonight, no wound left behind. I haven’t figured that bit out either, how a bite leaves no marks–”
“You just went and bit some random stranger?!” I blurted. “For one thing, violating people yet again,” emphasizing to remind him of his earlier incident.
“For another, what if he was a drunk driver, huh? Are you going around sucking on random people willy-nilly? Seems rather nasty, in my opinion, not to mention unsafe.”
His voice was low but playful. “Is that the kind of person you think I am? I’m actually rather hurt by that,” he said, his hand on his heart and his lower lip jutting out like a pouting child. His eyes twinkled with humor.
I’d had enough.
“Quit it! That juvenile, bubbly,” I continued with a flourishing hand, “Energizer bunny-leveled persona. I had to put up with that at work, don’t make me have to while I’m off the clock.”
“Wow, grumpy much?” He said with a surprised chuckle.
“But since you insist…”
He leaned forward, his forearms on his knees, hands clasped gently in front of him. His face grew serious, mouth slightly downturned, his brow lowered to nearly a glare. He loomed on the tiny couch and I suddenly felt even smaller than I already was.
His entire demeanor was suddenly changed; the aura in the room felt charged at the simple transformation.
This was a vampire I was dealing with. What was I doing insulting him like that?! Well, I mean, it was Michael and he was irritating and I was not prepared for a person like that to be suddenly passing by and crashing my evening. But the man who was sitting in front of me now was not the office bro. Not a homebody. This was a predator.
“I am not going around ‘willy-nilly,’ as you say. In fact I only ever had blood one other time, about a month after the accident.”
He took a breath in through his nose and slowly released it through his mouth, seeming to want to calm himself a bit before continuing.
“I had gone home to visit for the holidays, and there was a lot of extended family around this last year. It was the definition of chaos. The thirst started happening again and I was afraid of myself, of what I might accidentally do to someone I love if I didn’t get on top of it quickly.”
That makes sense. If I were a vampire, I think I’d be wary of being around my family at all for their safety.
“Fearful that I might hurt someone, I looked up and drove to a slaughterhouse and managed to get a pint of blood, ‘for an old family recipe,’ I think is what I made up.”
“After I was out of sight, I opened that container and drank right from it like it was a bowl of soup. It wasn’t as satisfying as human blood, but I didn’t have that thirst again during the holiday.”
“But that scare had me looking up ways to get my hands on some blood, or even substitutions for blood, on a regular basis; I even went so far as to attempt the vampire rabbit hole on the internet until that had my head spinning.”
“I’ve opted to stick with animal blood from various slaughterhouses and farms, and since I don’t need it every day, it's been really easy to hide my condition.”
“Huh, alright then,” I nodded, still very wary of the man less than four feet away. Even if he was getting blood from sources other than people – usually – he was still a very dangerous person who was close enough to touch me.
The silence stretched between us, taut and thrumming like a live wire. He looked at me like I held his whole existence in my hands. Maybe, for tonight at least, I did.
