“Trust me,” she purred.
I took another step.
The wolf launched herself across the space between me and the vampire, fangs aiming for the jugular.
“No!” I shouted, wrenching upright out of my bed.
My sudden movement caused the headphones to pull the CD player off the bedside table, and it clattered to the wooden floor.
My light was still on, and I was sitting fully dressed on the bed, with my shoes on. I glanced, disoriented, at the clock on my dresser. It was five-thirty in the morning.
I groaned, fell back, and rolled over onto my face, kicking off my boots. I was too uncomfortable to get anywhere near sleep, though. I rolled back over and unbuttoned my jeans, yanking them off awkwardly as I tried to stay horizontal. I pulled the pillow back over my eyes.
It was all no use, though. My subconscious had decided to wallow in the word I’d been trying so hard to avoid. I was going to have to deal with it now.
First things first, I thought to myself, glad to put it off as long as possible. I grabbed my bathroom stuff.
Showering didn’t take very long. I couldn’t tell if Charlie was still asleep, or if he’d left already. I went to the window, and the cruiser was gone. Early-morning fishing again.
I dressed slowly in yesterday’s jeans and an old sweatshirt, and then made my bed—which was just stalling.
I couldn’t put it off any longer. I went to my desk and switched on my old computer.
I hated using the Internet here. My modem belonged in a museum, and my free service really proved that you got what you paid for. Just dialing up took so long that I decided to grab a bowl of cereal while I waited.
I ate slowly, so the last bites were too soggy to finish. I washed the bowl and spoon, then put them away. My feet dragged as I climbed the stairs. I went to pick up my CD player first, then wound up the headphones’ cord, and put them away in the desk drawer. I turned the same CD on, but turned it down till it was just background noise.
With a sigh, I turned to my computer, already feeling stupid before I could even finish typing the word.
Vampire.
I felt even more stupid looking at it.
The results were difficult to sift through. Most of it was entertainment—movies, TV shows, role-playing games, metal bands.… There were goth clothes and makeup, Halloween costumes, and convention schedules.
Eventually I found a promising site—Vampires A–Z—and waited impatiently for it to load. The final page was simple and academic-looking, black text on a white background. Two quotes greeted me on the home page:
Throughout the vast shadowy world of ghosts and demons there is no figure so terrible, no figure so dreaded and abhorred, yet dight with such fearful fascination, as the vampire, who is himself neither ghost nor demon, but yet who partakes the dark natures and possesses the mysterious and terrible qualities of both.—Rev. Montague Summers
If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of the vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?—Rousseau
The rest of the site was an alphabetized listing of all the different myths of vampires found throughout the world. The first I clicked on, the Danag, was a Filipino vampire supposedly responsible for planting taro on the islands long ago. The myth continued that the Danag worked with humans for many years, but the partnership ended one day when a woman cut her finger and a Danag sucked her wound, enjoying the taste so much that it drained her body completely of blood.
I read carefully through the descriptions, looking for anything that sounded familiar, let alone plausible. It seemed that most vampire myths focused on beautiful women as demons and children as victims; they also seemed like excuses created to explain away the high mortality rates for young children, and to give guys an excuse for infidelity. Many of the stories were about bodiless spirits and warnings against improper burials. There wasn’t much that sounded like the movies I remembered, and just a couple, like the Hebrew Estrie and the Polish Upier, who were even that interested in drinking blood.
Only three entries really caught my attention: the Romanian Varacolaci, a powerful undead being who could appear as a beautiful, pale-skinned human, the Slovak Nelapsi, a creature so strong and fast it could massacre an entire village in the single hour after midnight, and one other, the Stregoni benefici.
About this last there was only one brief sentence.
Stregoni benefici: An Italian vampire, said to be on the side of goodness, and a mortal enemy of all evil vampires.
It was a strange relief, that one small entry, the one myth among hundreds that claimed the existence of good vampires.
Overall, though, there wasn’t much that fit with Jules’s story or my own observations. I’d created a catalogue in my mind, and as I’d read I’d compared it with each myth. Beauty, speed, strength, pale skin, eyes that shift color; and then Jules’s criteria: blood drinkers, enemies of the werewolf, cold-skinned, and immortal. There were very few myths that matched even one factor.
And then another problem, one that I’d remembered from the horror movies that I’d seen and that was backed up by today’s reading—vampires couldn’t come out in the daytime, the sun would burn them to a cinder. They slept in coffins all day and came out only at night.
Annoyed, I snapped off the computer’s main power switch, not waiting to shut things down right. Through my irritation, I felt overwhelming embarrassment. It was all so stupid. I was sitting in my room, researching vampires. What was wrong with me?
I had to get out of the house, but there was nowhere I wanted to go that didn’t involve a three-day drive. I pulled on my boots anyway, unclear where I was headed, and went downstairs. I shrugged into my raincoat without checking the weather and stomped out the door.
Overcast, but not raining yet. I ignored my truck and started east on foot, angling across Charlie’s yard toward the nearby forest. It didn’t take long till I was deep enough that the house and the road were invisible, and the only sound was the squish of the damp earth under my feet.
There was a narrow trail that led through the woods here; it wound deeper and deeper into the forest, mostly east as far as I could tell. It snaked around the spruces and the hemlocks, the yews and the maples. I only vaguely knew the names of the trees around me, and all I knew was thanks to Charlie pointing them out to me from the cruiser window a long time ago. There were lots I didn’t know, and others I couldn’t be sure about, because they were so covered in green parasites.
I followed the trail as long as my anger pushed me forward. As that started to fade, I slowed. A few drops of moisture trickled down from the canopy above me, but I couldn’t be sure if it was beginning to rain, or if it was simply pools left over from yesterday, stored high in the leaves above, slowly dripping their way to the ground. A recently fallen tree—I knew it was recent because it wasn’t entirely carpeted in moss—rested against the trunk of another, creating a sheltered little bench just a few feet off the trail. I stepped over the ferns and sat down, leaning my hooded head back against the living tree.
This was the wrong place to go. I should have known, but where else was there? The forest was deep green and far too much like the scene in last night’s dream to make me comfortable. Now that there was no longer the sound of my soggy footsteps, the silence was piercing. The birds were quiet, too, the drops increasing in frequency, so it must be raining above. The ferns stood almost as high as my head, now that I was seated, and I knew someone could walk by on the path, three feet away, and not even see me.
Here in the trees it was much easier to believe the stupid words that embarrassed me indoors. Nothing had changed in this forest for thousands of years, and all the old myths and legends seemed much more likely in this ancient green maze than they had in my mundane bedroom.