“Relax,” he said, not looking at me. “I know just the place.”

He did seem to know exactly where he was going, taking three more turns before driving onto a dirt road that twisted up a hillside. I saw no houses, only trees. When he stopped the car, I felt my stomach sink.

He used both arms to grab me, and he was strong. “Relax, relax,” he kept saying. And he laughed, as if he found my struggling funny. When I pretended to relax, he used one hand to unbutton my pants, and that’s when I lunged and bit him.

I didn’t plan it in any conscious way. Only when I saw his neck, exposed and bent before me, did it happen. I can still hear the sound of his scream. It sounded surprised, then angry, agonized, plead-ing — in the space of seconds. Then all I heard was my heart beating loud, and the sound of my sucking and swallowing.

What did it taste like? Like music. Like electricity. Like moonlight shining on rushing water. I drank my fill, and when I stopped, my own blood sang in my ears.

I spent the next hours walking through woods. I didn’t feel the cold, and I felt strong enough to walk for miles. The moon overhead was nearly full, and it stared down with blank indifference.

Gradually, my energy began to fade. My stomach churned, and I thought I would be sick. I stopped walking and sat on a tree stump.

I tried not to think about what I’d done, but I thought about it anyway. Was the man alive or dead? I hoped he was dead, and part of me was appalled at myself. What had I become?

I gagged, but I didn’t vomit. Instead I tilted my head back and watched the moon, visible between two tall trees. I breathed slowly. The nausea passed, and I felt ready to walk again.

The hill inclined steeply. Walking wasn’t easy, but without the moonlight, it would have been impossible. The trees grew close together. They were tall and bristly — some sort of pine, I supposed.

Father, I’m lost, I thought. I don’t even know the names of the trees. Mother, where are you?

I came to a crest and followed another path that gradually declined. Through the leafless brush, lights glimmered from below — indistinct at first, then brighter. Back to civilization, I thought, and the phrase cheered me.

When I heard voices, I stopped walking. They came from a clearing ahead.

I stayed among the trees and moved quietly around the perimeter of the open space.

There must have been five or six of them. Some wore capes, others pointed hats.

“I am vanquished!” someone shouted, and a boy wearing a cape waved a plastic sword at him.

I moved into the clearing and let them see me. “May I play?” I said. “I know the rules.”

For an hour we played on the hillside in the cold moonlight. This game differed from the one I’d watched at Ryan’s house; here, no one consulted spell-books, and everyone ad-libbed their parts. No one mentioned banks, either.

The game focused on a quest: to find and steal the werewolves’ treasure, which someone had hidden in the forest. The werewolves were the other “team,” playing somewhere nearby, and they’d given my team (the wizards) a set of written clues. “Keep thy eyes far from the sky / What you seek is closer by” was an early one.

“Who are you?” one of the boys had asked me, when I entered the game. “Wizard? Gnome?”

“Vampire,” I said.

“Vampire Griselda joins the Lounge Wizards,” he announced.

The clues seemed too easy to me. Wizard Lemur, the one who’d announced me, also read the clues; he was the group’s leader. Each time he read one, I moved instinctively as it directed. “Where the tallest tree doth grow / To its right side you must go.” That sort of thing. After a few minutes, I felt they were all watching me.

The treasure turned out to be a six-pack of beer hidden in a pile of dead branches. As I lifted the beer, the others cheered. “Vampire Griselda secures the treasure,” Lemur said. “Which we hope she’ll share.”

I handed him the six-pack. “I never drink,” I said, “beer.”

The wizards took me home with them.

I rode with Lemur (whose real name was Paul) and his girlfriend, Beatrice (real name Jane) in Jane’s beat-up old Volvo. They looked like brother and sister: multicolored hair cut in layers, skinny bodies, even the same frayed jeans. Jane was a college student. Paul had dropped out of school. I told them I’d run away from home. They said it was cool if I “crashed” at their place — an old house in downtown Asheville. They said I could have Tom’s room, since he was on tour with his band.

And crash is what I did, almost falling into the bed I’d been assigned. My body felt weary and excited at the same time, tingling from my head to my toes, and all I wanted to do was to lie still and take stock. I remembered my father describing his change of state, how he’d felt weak and sick, and I wondered why I didn’t feel weak. Maybe because I’d been born half vampire?

Would I need to bite more humans? Would my senses become more acute? I had a hundred questions, and the only one who could answer them was miles and miles away.

The days passed in an odd blur. At times I was intensely aware of every detail of the place and people around me; at others, I could focus only on one small thing, such as the blood pulsing under my skin; I could see the blood move through my veins with each beat of my heart. I stayed still for long periods of time. At some point I noticed that my talisman — the little bag of lavender — no longer hung from my neck. The loss didn’t matter much to me; one more familiar thing was gone.

The house was poorly heated and sparsely furnished with battered furniture. Paint was spattered on the walls, especially in the living room, where someone had begun to paint a mural of a dragon breathing fire, and quit before the dragon’s tail and feet were finished. Others had penciled in telephone numbers where the rest of the dragon should have been.

Jane and Paul accepted me without questions. I told them my name was Ann. They tended to sleep late, until one or two in the afternoon, and stay up until four or five a.m., usually smoking marijuana. Sometimes they dyed their hair, using Kool-Aid; Jane’s current color, lime green, made her look like a dryad.

Jane’s school was “out on winter break,” she told me, and she meant to “play hard” until classes resumed. Paul apparently lived this way all the time. Some days I barely saw them; others we spent “hanging out,” which meant eating, or watching movies on DVD, or walking around Asheville — a pretty town, ringed by mountains.

We spent my second night in the house gathered around a small television with the other Lounge Wizards, watching a movie so predictable that I didn’t pay attention to it. When it ended, the news came on — a signal for everyone to talk — but Jane nudged Paul and said, “Hey, check it out.”

The newscaster said police had no leads in the case of Robert Reedy, the thirty-five-year-old man found murdered in his car the day before. The video showed police officers standing near the red Corvette, then a pan of the woods nearby.

“That’s near where we were on Sunday,” Jane said.

Paul said, “Blame it on the werewolves.”

But Jane didn’t let it go. “Annie, did you see anything weird?”

“Only you all,” I said.

They laughed. “Kid’s been in the South like three days and she’s y’alling already,” Paul said. “Go, Annie.”

So his name was Robert Reedy, I thought. And I killed him.

They passed around a pipe, and when it came to me, I decided to try it to see if I could lighten my mood. But marijuana didn’t work for me.

The others engaged in long, rambling conversations. One began with Paul’s inability to find his car keys, the others chiming in suggestions for finding them, and ended with Jane repeating, again and again: “Everything is somewhere.”

Instead of talking, I spent the rest of the night staring at the pattern of the threadbare carpet on the floor, sure that the design must contain an important message.

On subsequent evenings, I always declined the pipe.

Paul said, “Annie doesn’t need to smoke. She’s naturally stoned.”

When I look back on my time in Asheville, I associate it with a song that Paul frequently played on the house stereo: “Dead Souls” by Joy Division.

I slept little, ate less, and spent hours doing nothing but breathe. Often, usually around three a.m., I wondered if I was ill, or even if I was going to die. I didn’t have the energy to look for my mother. I wondered if I should go home and try to recuperate — but what would my father think of me?

Sometimes I wandered to the window, sensing someone out there. Sometimes I was too frightened to look. What if Reedy’s ghost waited for me? When I did look, I saw nothing.

Each morning, the wavering reflection of my face in the mirror hadn’t changed; if anything, I looked healthier than I had when I left Saratoga Springs. So, I spent most days alone in my haze, or hanging out with Jane.

Jane’s idea of a good day was to sleep late, eat a lot, then stroll around Asheville, periodically talking to Paul on her cell phone. (He had a part-time job in a sandwich shop, and each night he brought home free food.) She’d perfected the art of thrifting (scouting secondhand stores for treasure); she could walk into a store and scan racks of clothes so quickly, with such precision, that in seconds she’d say, “Velvet jacket, third aisle center,” or “Nothing but rags today. We move on.”

We’d move on to coffee shops or “New Age” bookstores, where we’d read books and magazines without ever buying any. Once, Jane shoplifted a deck of Tarot cards, and I felt something stir in me. Was it conscience? I found myself wanting to say something to her, tell her to take them back. Instead, I said nothing. How could a murderer preach right and wrong to a shoplifter?

A few times a week we went to the supermarket, and Jane bought groceries. When I offered to help pay, she usually said, “Forget it. You eat like a bird, anyway.”

I normally didn’t eat much, but once in a while hunger came over me in waves, and then I devoured whatever I could find. I’d been raised a vegetarian, but now I craved meat — the rawer and bloodier, the better. One night, alone in my room, I ate a pound of raw hamburger. Afterward, my energy surged, but a few hours later it plummeted. There must be a better way to manage things, I thought.

Sometimes we got together with wizards and werewolves to role-play. The players had crafted identities much more intriguing than their actual ones. Why identify yourself as a college dropout or a mechanic or a fast-food server, when instead you could be a wizard, werewolf, or vampire?

One night we met the group at a club downtown. The place was like a warehouse, a long building with high ceilings; techno music echoed off the walls, and dim blue lights illumined the dance floor. I leaned against a wall to watch, then found myself dancing with a boy no taller than me — a sweet-faced boy with beautiful skin and dark curly hair.

After we’d danced awhile, we walked outside into an alleyway. He smoked a cigarette, and I looked up at the sky. No stars, no moon. For a moment I lost all sense of who I was, or where I was. When I came back to myself again, I thought of the scene in On the Road, when Sal woke up in a strange hotel room and didn’t know who he was. He said that his life felt haunted.

“What are you?” the boy with the curly hair asked me, and I said, “A ghost.”

He looked confused. “Paul — I mean, Lemur, said you were a vampire.”

“That too,” I said.

“Perfect,” he said. “I’m a donor.”

I folded my arms, but my eyes were on his throat — his fine, white-skinned, narrow throat.

“Will you sire me?” he asked.

*** Copyright: Novel12.Com