A Little Vampire Story Read online

floated and flipped end-over-end to the ground, I realized I would never have to endure a driver’s license test.

  “There is our victim,” Minutio pointed.

  A middle-aged man in jeans and a worn Chicago Bears jacket was stumbling across a bar’s parking lot a hundred feet below us. His uncertain feet sent him lurching into cars, bouncing between them like a Ping-Pong ball, and on one of his careening ricochets, a bottle slipped from his hand and shattered musically on the pavement.

  It was my Algebra teacher, Mr. Connely.

  “Now is the time for you to strike,” Minutio whispered, hovering by my shoulder like a little devil with no corresponding angel to contradict him. “Descend upon him, and fulfill your destiny.”

  It did seem like Destiny. Sixteen years of a relatively moral upbringing clashed with the memory of the “D” Mr. Connely gave me last year. Was I a murderer? Was I a killer? Who gave a crap about the value of x, anyway?

  Before I knew what was happening, the ground rushed toward me, my black dress flapping about my legs as Mr. Connely grew larger and larger. He heard me, or sensed me, perhaps, because he glanced up, jaw swinging slackly, until he saw his death.

  “Hoh!” was all he could grunt, before I was on him.

  It is much harder than you think to swoop down on your prey like that. It requires a great deal of timing and skill, and most of all practice, which I’d had none of. So, instead of scooping him up and off into the night like a hawk catching fish out of a lake, I crashed directly into him and smashed him backwards into the side of a car.

  We were both reeling about dizzily; Mr. Connely from drink, me from hurtling into the pavement. His bloated belly bumped into me, and without thinking, I reached out, grabbed him, and bit him in the neck.

  “Ow!” he shouted, jerking away from me and holding a hand to his neck. “Whaddahell you doin’?”

  “You’ve got the angle wrong!” Minutio squeaked, pointing to his own neck. “Up here! Up here!”

  Mr. Connely screamed at the sight of the tiny vampire, and struggled to pull out of my grip, but my strength was that of ten men. His feeble thrashings were nothing; indeed, they only served to stir up the flames of rage and hate within me, drawing out my predatory instincts, and I flirted with the idea of beating the crap out of him for that time he made a doof of me when I was working out a problem on the blackboard.

  Then, I kicked him in the nuts.

  It was the first time I’d done that, too, and I think I way overdid it. A kick to the jimmies is pretty harsh to begin with, and when you add in the strength of a vampire- well, let’s just say he was better off dying at that point.

  The algebra teacher’s tongue protruded out of his mouth as he gurgled and fell to his knees. In a flash, I was on him again, and this time I did not miss.

  Blood squirted into my mouth like a macabre piece of Freshen-up gum; so much, so fast it nearly gagged me. It swirled down my throat, pounded its way into my gullet in a never-ending torrent, and I did not stop drinking until it stopped flowing.

  It was gross. The legends all spoke of the euphoria vampires experience when drinking blood, the shared ecstasy for both victim and predator, but the truth was, it just tasted like a salty ass. A dirty, salty ass. I had to force it down, like the time Rob Zelliwig had a party while his parents were out of town, and we all played Anchorman and had to chug a crazy amount of beer, and then that dork Billy Peterman tried to feel me up when he thought I was passed out.

  Mr. Connely’s body dropped to the ground. He would solve no more equations; he would torment the students of Levante High School no longer.

  “Come,” Minutio squeaked, tugging at my sleeve, trying to shake my staring eyes from the corpse.

  I was a killer. A murderer. I had taken the life of my algebra teacher, and now my stomach was starting to hurt.

  “I feel awful,” I groaned.

  “Do not agonize over the carcass of this mortal,” Minutio squeaked, misunderstanding me. “You are beyond such trivial concerns now.”

  “No, I…”

  “No more of this!” he squeaked insistently, and pulled me into the air again. “I must take you somewhere!”

  A branch full of twigs and leaves nearly swatted me out of the sky, but I was learning quickly, and avoided it. “Where?”

  “To my subjects. They have gathered to pay homage to me.”

  We flew on in silence after that, the lights of the town twinkling fireflies far beneath our feet. I barely noticed; dark expectations of how Minutio’s followers would appear stalked my thoughts. Would they accept me? Shun me? Teach me? Torture me?

  Oh, what had I done? Giving myself to a breed of murderous immortals, fallen angels, who worshipped a six inch king?

  “There,” Minutio pointed.

  The temple was massive, unfeeling stone, shaped by nameless workers countless years ago. Squat, rectangular, gray as the soul of the vampire I now was, it sat aside a busy thoroughfare, watching tens and hundreds of unknowing mortals drive by, waiting, thirsting, wanting.

  “We lease the space,” Minutio squeaked, pointing out the MASONIC TEMPLE sign as I alit upon the front stair like a black stray cat unsure whether its curiosity would take another of its nine lives. The vampire stayed by my right shoulder as I approached the huge double doors, licking my lips nervously, my bellyache forgotten, paling in comparison to the fear of what unknown horrors lay within the Masonic Temple.

  Curiosity won out, aided by the insistent squeaks of Minutio, and with a straining grunt, I opened the doors and met my destiny.

  It was horrible.

  Dozens of vampires were seated or standing about the massive meeting hall, and not one of them was wearing black. Not one. Jeans, sweaters, leather bomber jackets, shirts and ties, even a miniskirt, for Pete’s sake, but not one Gothic dreary costume in the whole lot. They looked more like a bunch of twenty- and thirty-something pub-dwellers rather than centuries-old dungeon-dwellers. There I was, in my long black dress, black fishnet stockings, black combat boots, dyed-black hair, black lipstick, black nailpolish, and I’m smack-dab in the middle of a friggin’ L.L. Bean convention. It totally blew.

  “Oh, Christ, here he is,” somebody grumbled, as Minutio flew into the center of the hall.

  “Greetings, my subjects, my children,” Minutio said, as loudly as he could. “Tonight, we welcome another deathless soul into our ranks. Welcome…”

  He frowned. “Um, what was your name again?”

  “Cassandra,” I said as loud and as boldly as I could, enduring the stares of the yuppie vampires as my voice echoed throughout the Masonic Temple “I am called Cassandra.”

  “Cassandra? Nice to meetcha. I’m Bill,” a bearded vampire who looked way too much like my guidance counselor introduced himself, standing up and walking me over to his table. “Can I call you Cassie?”

  “Well, I…”

  “This is Sally, and Floyd, and Jimmy,” Bill pointed around the table. “Everybody? This is Cassie.”

  “Cassan…” I started to correct, but my stomach really started to hurt again, and a piteous moan escaped my lips.

  “You okay?” Bill asked, looking at me carefully.

  “It is merely the death of her mortal shell,” Minutio squeaked.

  “Death of her mortal shell, my ass,” Bill grunted, guiding me into a chair. “She’s got an upset stomach. Don’t you, Cassie?”

  I could only nod.

  “Did Minutio take you out hunting?”

  Another nod.

  “How much did you drink?”

  My deathless shoulders shrugged. “As much as came out.”

  Exasperated groans and sighs erupted around the table. “Jeez, Cassie!” Sally scolded. “What did you do, kill the guy?”

  “Well… yeah,” I frowned. Of course I had killed him- I was a vampire.

  “Oh, Cassie,” Bill sighed, sounding as if he were disappointed in me. “You don’t have to kill them. You mu
st’ve drank three pints, at least. No wonder you’re sick.”

  “How much should I drink?”

  “You only need a pint or so,” Sally frowned at me with distaste.

  “Most of us don’t even bite people anymore,” Bill said.

  “Where do you get your blood from?”

  “Blood banks, mostly,” Sally answered, laying a loving hand on Bill’s with a smile. “That’s where I met him.”

  “Blood banks definitely have the primo juice,” Jimmy agreed. “Score yourself a graveyard shift at a hospital or something ASAP.”

  “But,” I protested, “what about being immortal predators? What about the shared ecstasy, the connection between the dying victim and the feeding…”

  “Oh, great. Another Goth,” Sally muttered.

  “Cassie, honey, did you get any of that when you killed that guy earlier tonight?” Bill asked.

  “Well, uh… no.”

  Bill nodded, as if to say, there you are, then.

  This was awful. For months, years, I had prepared myself mentally for the dark realm of the undead, feeding on Stoker and Rice and anything else vampiric I could get my hands on. I knew what it meant to be a vampire: cold, dark, rotting coffins, orgasmic blood-drainings, eternal torment, all that good stuff. But here was Bill and Sally and Jimmy and freaking Floyd, telling me that real vampires work for the Red Cross and dress casual and probably drive Sport Utility vehicles when they don’t feel like flying.

  “Gawd,” I muttered. “If I knew it was going to be like this, I never would’ve went to all the trouble of that ritual.”

  “You did the ritual?” Floyd snickered. “What