Vampires of the Sun (9 page)

              “What about some shoes Summer?” Jack asked for Norah as if he had read her mind.

              “We’re not the same size. She’s all petite and dainty where I’m all muscular and strong. I don’t wear a size 7 shoe so I can’t help.” Summer huffed, upset for some unknown reason.

              “We’ll remedy that later. There’s a store up the road that is still open that we can get some shoes at.” Jack turned back to James. “So you agree, Kansas is an okay place to take her?”

              “Yes, I suppose it is fine. I don’t think you can stay there long though. Being with other vampires won’t make you safer. It will make you a target and any one of them could give up information that would lead to your demise.” James warned, knowing how easily betrayal worked.

              “We’ll be careful. Don’t worry so much James. You taught me well.” Jack said light-heartedly. It comforted Norah to know that he wasn’t very worried or at least he was hiding his fear well.

              “You should leave as soon as you can. It’s going to take you two days to get there with having to avoid the sun. You remember the hotel near Denton we found? The one with the windowless rooms? I’ll book you two nights there so you can sleep during the day. Grab a cooler and some blood bags. I wish you luck.” James said, standing up and clasping Jack’s hand before giving him a big, fatherly hug.

              Jack did as he said, quickly making sure he had everything he wanted while Norah waited in the entranceway.

              “You can have her if you want? Maxine is a good dog and I think she really likes you. She might like you more than me.” Norah offered to Summer who looked overly attached to her dog.

              “I don’t want her. I will keep her here until you come back though. When it’s safe, then you can have her back.” Summer sniffed, acting offended that Norah would suggest she would want some mangy mongrel.

When Jack gave Norah a nod that he was ready, they went out to the car and backed out of the drive-way without a regretful look back. Jack didn’t talk as they got onto the road and he kept it that way until he pulled into a Walmart. “Stay here. I’m going to go in and get a few things.”

              Norah didn’t know why but when she thought about the concept of vampires, it didn’t include shopping at Walmart at midnight. Belief in the reality of such a creature had never seemed possible so why shouldn’t she associate only the finest things in life with a creature always made out to be explicitly royal in attitude. The reality here was that in order to maintain a human disguise, Walmart wasn’t going to be a place that was off-limits.

              Half an hour of sitting bored in the car and Jack was finally back with a couple of bags. “I got you a couple of things to tide you over.” He pulled out some black slip-on Keds and some socks and handed them to her before throwing the rest of the bags in the back of the car with his own stuff.

              “We’ve got a ways until Denton. Will you tell me about yourself? The stuff that you didn’t want to mention before because I didn’t know that vampires are real? I want to know your history.” Norah said, trying to keep the silence away.

              “I suppose I could. I haven’t been a vampire for very long. It’s only been ten years. Someone like James, who has been a vampire for over three hundred years, would scoff at baby vampires like us. I don’t know the vampire who turned me. I think he was a rogue, going up and down the country turning kids into vampires. I heard there were a couple of clans who wanted him dead. So he was trying to turn as many young adults as he could before they tied him to the ground and let him burn in the sun. It’s an unwritten rule that you don’t turn children into vampires because they won’t be able to help themselves out of a bad spot and won’t be able to get money easily. It’s a death sentence essentially.” As Norah listened, she opened the sun roof and peered out into the night sky, looking at the stars.

              “I was 19 years old when I was turned. I’ve always looked a bit young for my age so I think the vampire who turned me thought I was younger and made me his target. I used to go to school in San Antonio. I had my own apartment off-campus without any roommates because of the grants and scholarships I received. I was in my second year, studying Economics. I wanted to be able to go back and earn enough money to support my family. My parents were poor and couldn’t afford food on the rare occasion. They emigrated from Puerto Rico and being an immigrant is hard. I was born here so I received citizenship. The man who turned me found me when I was going out to my car for a late night fast food run and coffee during finals week. He buried me in a shallow grave that I had to escape from all by myself and he left me all alone while he headed towards Mexico.”

              “When I was turned, I couldn’t go back home and I couldn’t continue school. Night school isn’t really night school. It’s ‘just after 5 p.m. school’ really and since the sun doesn’t go down till later, I had to drop out. At first I tried to tell my parents that everything was fine. I pretended to still be going to school. I got a job at a bar, making sure to only take night-time hours. There was no one to teach me how to deal with the hunger or how to properly feed so I was a bit sloppy. I would wait until I couldn’t wait any longer before finding an out of town patron of our bar. I’d take them into the back alley when no one was looking and feed from them. At first, I killed every single one of them. I had a body count that matched my age. It was awful.”

              “James came to town looking for me. Not me specifically but for the vampire who was murdering people. He had seen the news stories of unexplained murders or disappearances and he knew it was a vampire. He had heard the rumors about the vampire who turned me and thought I might have been some protégé who couldn’t help themselves. When he found me, the poor pathetic unlearned boy that I was, I thought he was going to kill me. I could smell him the moment he entered my bar. You’ll learn that there is quite a distinctive smell about us night-walkers.”

              “I wasn’t killed. James taught me how to control myself and how to continue on through eternity by changing my identity and how to earn enough money to live a lavish lifestyle. He invited me to join his clan which already contained Summer and Dawn. I agreed only because my parents came looking for me. I’d stopped contacting them and they had learned that I wasn’t in school any longer. I became the last unsolved crime case from a series of disappearances that I had created. How ironic. I had to leave my whole life behind.”

              “I’m happy that I can help you with every step of your submersion into a child of the night. You won’t have to be all alone and you’ll be able to learn the tricks we can do even faster than I did.” Norah was blinded by his smile, taking in all of his visible teeth and his happiness to be able to help her.

              “What do you mean tricks?” Norah questioned dumbly.

              “Tricks or abilities, really. Each vampire is better at different tricks. Some are very good at creating fires with their mind. Some can read human minds adeptly and some can do mind control like a puppeteer. Flight through the sky is also possible but most everyone can do it with enough practice. I suppose this is why humans think vampires are bat-like. Also, excellent vision and hearing comes with the territory. I’m best at reading human minds from my small bit of practice. James and Mauve are good at Mind Control. Dawn and Summer both excel at fire. I wish they would have come with us because fire-wielders would have been handy if we need to make an escape.”

              “What about the first vampire? What created them? Are there other supernatural creatures aside from vampires?” Norah asked, curious about how such supernatural creatures could do such amazing feats without a little magic.

              “I don’t think anyone knows honestly about the first vampire. There are those who could be considered elders in the sense that they have lasted for a thousand years but it is hard to last forever. We can potentially live for forever but grief, natural disasters, accidents and the like can destroy a vampire. We’re susceptible to fire, sunlight and the severing of one’s head from one’s body. Also the myth of being staked in the heart is all too real. The heart is what keeps the blood we drink flowing properly throughout the body. I’ve even heard that being near running water makes some vampires uncomfortable purely because the concept of such vibrant life is disheartening to something dead like ourselves. My own theory however, is we are mutated humans with parasites in our spit. I’ve heard that the human mouth is utterly disgusting and filled with diseases. It would make sense that we could become mutated from a bad gene or parasitic saliva. I’m not a scientist and I’m not all that interested in figuring out how and why we are the way we are. While I’m not happy I wasn’t given a choice to become this way, I like the idea of living forever. I’m a romantic and would love to read every classic piece of literature in existence and have the time to learn enough languages to go anywhere in the world and blend like a local.”

              “As for other creatures? I know they exist but we never have any dealings with them. They stay away from vampires. Their ability to sniff one out is even greater than a vampires. They will know you are there long before you will ever sense them and whether it is from fear, they do not feel like alerting us to their presence. I know James has had dealings in the past with a werewolf clan but he doesn’t say much about it other than the deal went sour by the end and he fled rather than slaughtering them all. He didn’t say if it was because he couldn’t do it physically or if he just chose not to. James is a fairly secretive guy. I just get the feeling that I shouldn’t want to meet with one.”

              “Human existence is fragile. Knowing that something like a gunshot won’t kill me is comforting and I never liked the idea of mortality even before I was turned. It’s a fountain of youth and I will never grow old and I will never die if I’m relatively careful.” Jack, despite how he’d mentioned that he could be killed in a relatively easy manner in Norah’s opinion, seemed so sure he wouldn’t be dying any time soon.

              “What about my parents? What do you know about them? I know James didn’t want to discuss them with me around. I think he knows something although I haven’t a clue what.” It had been scratching Norah’s brain ever since she saw James giving her strange glances.

              “He didn’t say anything I didn’t already know, which sadly isn’t much but still doesn’t sound too good. We don’t know a lot about your parents. James is an old vampire and he’s never heard of them and never sensed them when he was in Austin nor heard anything about potential vampire attacks that could have led him to them. I suspect it’s because they’ve rarely been here like you told me before. They only come for short visits and I suspect that your parents might be older vampires. I didn’t think so before, because I thought they had you, but being in that facility where I rescued you from has got me thinking that they might be near a thousand years old. I don’t know if they used technology like a surrogate mother to birth you from sperm and eggs directly from your parents but if they are some kind of patron of the sciences, who knows what they might have learned. I know there are others in that facility. I don’t know who they are and what has been done to them but I did learn from blending into the crowd that you were the only one like you. I wish I had more time to dig around but I took my chance when it became available to get you out of there since it was my top priority.”

              “Thank you. I honestly don’t know what I would have done if I had stayed there. I wish I knew what my parents had been planning to do with me after turning. I haven’t ever felt like they were my parents and this whole situation has brought about a fire inside of me that I never knew I had. I never liked them and they were never loving, caring parents. I hate them.” Tired, Norah sat back into the seat, getting comfortable.

              “When we get to Kansas, we can figure out what to do from there. James did tell me to use whatever funds I needed. He’s quite wealthy, and not just from the club. He has been investing for hundreds of years and basically earns money from his money. It’s ridiculous. I know you like nice clothes so I wanted to get you something better than cheap shoes from Walmart but it has to do for now.” Settling into a comfortable silence, neither knowing what else to say, Norah focused on the outside scenery. If she focused, everything appeared brighter and she knew it was from heightened vision. She could see small creatures in the grass on the side of the ride like the occasional possum, rabbit, and even deer. She hadn’t gotten used to the strange feeling of being outside of her body. She wasn’t quite comfortable in her own skin yet.

              Not keeping track of the time, content to listen to music and stare out the window, Norah was surprised to be pulling into a hotel parking lot around 2 a.m. Taking her minimal things from the back seat, she followed Jack towards the hotel. Before they went into the lobby, he turned to look at her.

              “You’re going to be very hungry when we interact with the human staff. You’ll smell their blood and it’ll make you thirsty. Just stare at the wall or the floor and you have to think to yourself that you can’t eat them. I’ll get the room. You can have another blood bag in the room.” His hands went up to her hair and smoothed it down, tucking it behind her ears on both sides with a smile. His thumbs rubbed underneath her eyes before he dropped them back to his sides and picked up the bag he’d dropped.