Braced to Bite Read online

  I looked up at my mom in horror when the reality of what I’d just done sunk in. She wore a dazed look on her face. Her eyes were unfocused and her lips formed a small O of surprise. She didn’t seem to be in pain. She seemed to be in shock.

  “Mom?” I asked uncertainly and then her eyes came into focus, staring at me. Then she screamed at the top of her lungs. I jumped back, putting my hands over my ears as my dad rushed into the room with Great-Aunt Chloe hot on his heels.

  Dad caught sight of me first and he let out a very nonmasculine shriek himself. He positioned himself between Mom and me in a protective gesture.

  The only one who seemed to keep her cool was Great-Aunt Chloe, which wasn’t surprising since she was deaf as a post without her hearing aid and could barely see five feet in front of her due to cataracts. Actually she was my great-great-aunt but I always shortened it to great-aunt or aunt so she didn’t feel so old.

  “What’s all this caterwauling about? Goodness gracious …” She took a moment to recognize me and threw open her arms in welcome.

  It is surprising that the one person who would greet me with such unreserved joy was the one relative I rarely saw. But she at least seemed happy to see me so I rushed into her arms and hugged her back. She smelled like rose water and vanilla wafers. I never noticed that before. I used to think she smelled like old person, but not tonight. Tonight she smelled wonderful.

  “Oh child! We thought you were done for. Our prayers have been answered,” she crooned, hugging me even tighter. For a frail old woman of eighty something, she had quite a grip to her.

  “Exactly how late for curfew am I?” I asked tentatively, surprised by her relieved declarations.

  My aunt gave a dry cackle of relief. “Why, dear, you’ve been gone since Friday night—nearly forty-eight hours. We’ve had the police scouring the neighborhood for you. There is a candlelight vigil at your school right now.”

  “Really?” I asked, surprised. Could I have been unconscious in that ravine for nearly two days?

  “Let me look at you.” Aunt Chloe pulled away and held my face in her hands. Since she was barely five foot, I had to bend over quite a bit to give her a good look.

  “Hmmm,” she said as she peered into my face. “What color are your eyes, dear?” she asked me.

  “Uh, blue,” I responded.

  She raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Okay, fine. They’re gray. Sometimes I wear colored contacts to make them look bluer.” Sheesh.

  “When was the last time you saw some sun?”

  “What do you mean?” Sure, we lived in the Pacific Northwest and it rained quite a bit, but I was usually a lovely golden shade thanks to the advances in tanning-booth technology. “I tanned just yesterday so I would look good cheering at the game. Why?”

  “You’re white as a ghost, my dear. And your eyes are a funny shade.”

  “What kind of funny shade?” I pulled away, looking for something shiny. My father was surprisingly helpful as he was holding a heavy copper teakettle in his hand. I tried to ignore the menacing way he yielded it when I took it from him and looked at myself in the surface of the kettle. My eyes did look different, lighter. The copper was skewing the color but they definitely didn’t look gray, or blue for that matter.

  “I need a better mirror.” I walked past my aunt into the family room and ducked into the small bathroom there. I took one look at myself and screamed.

  They all came running at the sound of my distress. My parents might have been leery of me in the kitchen, but the sound of their only child screaming kicked the primal protection gene in gear.

  My hair was a matted, muddy mess. No surprise considering I’d been sleeping with the mushrooms and blackberry brambles for the last two nights, but it was my skin and eye color that held me transfixed. My skin was pale. Not pale as in, “I haven’t been to the Tannery in a while,” but pale as in, “I’ve never seen the light of day before.” It was almost translucent, obvious despite the dirt and scrapes on my face. If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn I was very ill … or a Goth.

  Then there were my eyes. My very yellow eyes. Gone was the gray of years past. Now they were a glowing yellow. Ugh.

  “What—what happened to me?” I stuttered. Could this be a common side effect of getting terrorized, like someone’s hair turning white overnight?

  “Where have you been? What happened to you?” My mother finally spoke for the first time, rubbing her palm with her other hand. She didn’t say a word about my drinking her blood, for which I was thankful; but still, add that to the yellow eyes and white skin and I would have been running for the hills if I were her. Amazing woman, my mom.

  “Well, after the game I walked home.” No need to get into the humiliating details of how Aidan took out Allison instead of me.

  “I took the, uh, back route.” I looked up at them expecting to be chastised about walking through the woods at night with an attacker at large in the neighborhood, but they were silent.

  “I was almost to the road when some guy stepped out of the shadows and he, he, threw me down.” My mother gasped and reached out to hug me but my father put his arm out to stop her.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Well, I kneed him and fought but he held me down easily. He pinched my neck and I sort of froze in shock. I kept fighting him and that made him really mad.

  “He picked me up and threw me into the ravine. I woke up and came straight home. I had no idea I was unconscious for two days.”

  I was really embarrassed about what happened to me. Maybe it was wrong to purposely leave out that the Attacker made me drink something. I didn’t feel like having my stomach pumped and besides, if it was poison I would have been dead by now. It must have been something to make me sleep, since two days had passed.

  I pushed my way out of the bathroom past them, where they stood frozen in the doorway, and sat down on the burgundy couch in our family room. I grabbed one of the chenille pillows and hugged it to my chest. This small gesture of normalcy made me feel better. Whenever I was feeling bad, I would cuddle up with a pillow on the couch and try to sort things out.

  They followed me slowly.

  “Is that all that happened?” Dad asked me softly, almost afraid of my answer.

  “Yes, Dad. That is all that happened. Isn’t it enough?” I asked angrily. I was pissed at myself but it seemed easier to yell at him. Dad had broad shoulders; in my state of mind, he could handle this burden better than I could right now.

  “Honey, we need to get you to a doctor and get you checked out,” my father said to the group.

  “No!” The women shouted at once, surprising him and each other.

  It was Aunt Chloe who offered the short-term solution. “I will give her a checkup. I didn’t spend fifty-plus years as a nurse and survive two wars that I can’t manage a common physical.”

  Aunt Chloe stood up and gestured for me to follow her to the spare bedroom. Apparently she had heard of my disappearance and had moved in from the local retirement village to help my family through this tough time.

  “Marilyn, could you please join me? John, you stay here and for goodness sake, don’t call anyone or do anything until we are done.”

  Dad nodded as he sank down in his favorite recliner, dropping his head into his hands.

  I obediently followed Aunt Chloe and Mom into the spare bedroom and sat down on the bed. Aunt Chloe searched through her bag and pulled out a few items. Blood pressure wrist band, stethoscope, thermometer, a large Baggie filled to the rim with pill bottles that rattled around when she dropped it on the bed.

  “Where did I put it?” she mumbled to herself and Mom and I shared a look. Mom patted my hand reassuringly and I smiled at her.

  “Aha, here it is!” Aunt Chloe said triumphantly, brandishing a large magnifying glass in her hand. “Now, dear, let’s get a good look at your neck. Where were you pinched?”

  I was relieved she wanted to start there. I had no doubt if Dad was i
n charge, he would want to know if I had been molested in some way—and getting a pelvic exam by my great-great-aunt was not my idea of a good time.

  I pulled my hair to the side and showed her the spot.

  “Marilyn, could you get me a warm washcloth so we can clean up her neck a little bit?”

  Mom jumped to do her bidding, anxious to be helping in any small way. When my neck was relatively dirt free, my aunt gazed at it through the looking glass and made a lot of hmmm and ahh sounds.

  She pointed out a bruise to my mother where I was pinched and then identified two small incision marks, barely visible in the bruise.

  My mother looked down at her hand, the one I’d sucked on, and showed it to my great-aunt, then proceeded to tell her what I did when I entered the kitchen. I squirmed in my seat, wishing I could run away and hide. I hear people do really odd things when they are in shock, but I doubted they nibbled on their mothers’ hands and helped themselves to a blood cocktail.

  Then Aunt Chloe wrapped a wide medical gadget on my wrist and turned it on.

  “What’s this?” I asked curiously, my wrist getting squeezed uncomfortably.

  “It’s my blood-pressure band. It helps me keep track of my high blood pressure—which is why I need those pills.” She gestured to the overflowing Baggie.

  I nodded and looked at the large digital face of the wrist band, which stayed suspiciously blank.

  “Is it broken?” I asked when the LED registered only one pulse the entire time it was on my wrist.

  “Don’t think so. Marilyn, let’s do you.” She took the cuff off of me and put it on my mom.

  Mom’s reading showed an unusually high blood pressure, which was understandable considering the situation, and a decent pulse rate.

  They both looked at the cuff, then me, pursing their lips in speculation. At that moment, I saw the family resemblance perfectly.

  “Let’s take her temperature,” Mom suggested as she picked up an ancient-looking thermometer. She took it into the bathroom to wash. She walked back shaking the mercury down and put it under my tongue.

  I sat obediently, the glass stick placed awkwardly under my tongue. After a minute, they read the thermometer and then stared at me strangely.

  “Ninety-eight point six?” I asked hopefully.

  “Uh, no,” my mom replied, less than helpfully.

  Aunt Chloe took her stethoscope out and listened to my heart and lungs. She nodded in satisfaction, putting her tools of the trade back in the bag. She took her time tidily arranging all of her things. Mom sat down next to me again and held my hand. When Aunt Chloe was done straightening things up, she stood up and made her medical pronouncement.

  “Well, technically you’re dead,” she announced with flourish.

  Three

  “But you’re obviously not dead, or you wouldn’t be walking around and talking. So you must be undead. My guess is a vampire.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me!” I exclaimed incredulously. Surely ol’ Aunt Chloe had lost it.

  “Nope. Seen it before. In the war. We’d get those boys in with a toe tag but when we tried to move them they would sit up and grab the nearest person and have themselves a drink.”

  Mom and I gaped at her.

  “Course, we couldn’t have our dead lads feeding on our orderlies so we would have to, uh, make the toe tag official, so to speak.”

  “You mean you had to kill them? Again?”

  “Stake through the heart. Wasn’t an easy decision to make but when you have so many men who are alive that need you and one who is beyond your help that could hurt them, well, the decision is obvious.”

  “Were there a lot of vampires?” I asked uneasily, still not sold on this hypothesis.

  “No, I only came across three in my war days. Of course other units may have seen more. Some things we all understood but didn’t talk about. I mean, back in the States, who would believe one of our soldiers had turned vampire?”

  We both nodded our agreement. After all, it was far-fetched even to me, and I was supposed to be one.

  “I thought vampires couldn’t go out in the sunlight.”

  “They can’t. Them toe-tagged boys arrived covered in a sheet, and we didn’t just get wounded during office hours. It was war, Colby. People killing each other at all hours of the day and night.”

  My aunt looked so ferocious at that moment I could easily see a younger version, snapping out orders and operating on fallen soldiers. It didn’t take much of a stretch to see this younger version breaking a chair leg and staking an undead vampire either. Her job was to protect the soldiers and she’d done it.

  “But I was out all day, in the sunlight, while I was in the ravine. Okay, maybe not the sunlight ’cause it was cloudy but it was definitely daytime.”

  Aunt Chloe nodded thoughtfully.

  “And fangs? What about fangs? I don’t have any.” I opened my mouth wide to prove my perfect smile was fang-free.

  “What about feeding on your mother?” she countered.

  I closed my mouth and looked down at my lap, ashamed. Good question. How was I going to defend that action?

  My mom spoke up. “It’s okay, honey. You didn’t hurt me. If anything, you saved me from getting stitches. That cut was very deep and you healed it. I don’t think you drank my blood at all. I’m not woozy—I feel fine.”

  I was grateful for her defense but couldn’t let her minimize what I’d done.

  “Mom, I may not have any fangs but I drank your blood. I just couldn’t help myself. I smelled the blood and wanted it. I was just so thirsty. I didn’t drink much,” I assured her when I saw the look on her face. “As quick as the thirst came on, it went away. I was full pretty quick.”

  My mom stared at me in shock and horror. I’d never seen that look before—like she was afraid of me—and I couldn’t bear it.

  I dropped down to my knees in front of her and laid my head in her lap.

  “Mommy, I’m sooo sorry. I promise I won’t ever do it again. I won’t hurt you, I promise. Please forgive me. Don’t be scared of me.” I sobbed into her lap, clutching her legs.

  After a moment I felt her hands stroke my matted hair, like she did when I was a child begging for forgiveness. She crooned nonsense words to soothe me. I looked up at her and saw tears rolling silently down her cheeks. She braved a small smile and all I saw reflected in her eyes was love.

  “There, now, that’s better. See, being a vampire isn’t the end of the world. Course, things are gonna be a little different, but we can figure that out,” Aunt Chloe reassured me.

  “But I can’t be a vampire, I don’t have any fangs!” I protested again.

  “Maybe they only come out when you are ready to feed?” she suggested.

  “No, Colby didn’t have any fangs when she was with me,” Mom pointed out and I was grateful she didn’t use the term “feed.”

  “Well, open your mouth. Let’s take a look,” Aunt Chloe commanded and I obeyed instantly.

  She ummmed a lot, counting my teeth and poking at them with her finger.

  “You are missing some teeth,” she declared after her inspection.

  I looked at Mom helplessly.

  “Yes, when she was twelve she had oral surgery and they removed six teeth. Her wisdom teeth, which hadn’t broken through the gums yet, and two others.”

  Aunt Chloe squinted at my mother. “Those other two, were they canine teeth?”

  Mom nodded. “Yes, then she had braces for a year and wore headgear at night.”

  “Well, that explains it then.”

  Mom and I looked at each other and her in confusion.

  “What does?” I asked.

  “Your fangs are gone, dear. Fangs are canine teeth. You had those removed. So your fangs can’t grow now, can they?”

  I opened my mouth but nothing came out when the logic of what she said sank in. It made sense. Before I drank my mom’s blood, I’d experienced a throbbing pain in my mouth. More specifically, in my u
pper gums. Crap.

  “Great! That’s just great. Not only am I a vampire, but I’m a mutant vampire. I have no fangs.”

  “Well, I’d say the problem is a little more than that. How are you going to feed without fangs?”

  “Feed?” I asked stupidly. “I’m not going to feed again, ever.” I shivered at the thought of drinking more blood, but my stomach growled treacherously. My mind might revolt, but my body didn’t seem to share the sentiment.

  “Honey, your aunt is right. You are going to have to eat.”

  “No way. That is just gross.”

  “If you don’t feed, you die,” my aunt said matter-of-factly.

  “Who says? I’m not like the other vampires. I can go out in sunlight. Maybe I can eat real food too.” I stood up and walked to the door. “I’m going to make myself a tuna sandwich right now.” I marched out of the bedroom, straight past my father who seemed to be in the same position we’d left him in, and into the kitchen.

  I opened the fridge and gasped when I saw how much food was stuffed inside. Casseroles, quiches, etcetera, filled the shelves. Mom must have been beside herself with worry.

  I pushed the thought aside and pulled out the makings of a monster tuna sandwich.

  By the time I was ready for my first bite, my aunt and mother joined me in the kitchen. Dad was suspiciously absent.

  “Here it goes.” I saluted them with my sandwich and took a bite. Not bad, but not as good as I remembered. A little on the bland side but it was sustenance nonetheless. I swallowed my first bite in triumph. Aha! I didn’t need blood to survive. As long as I had sandwiches, I would be fine.

  I was smiling smugly at the thought when my stomach revolted. I ran to the sink in time to throw up my victorious bite.

  Aunt Chloe handed me a warm washcloth when I was done so I could wash my face (or wipe the smugness away). Regardless, I used it gratefully.

  I rinsed out the sink then said flatly, “I am going to take a shower now.” They let me skulk away without comment. After all, finding out you’re a vampire was one thing, but adding I-told-you-so’s was like getting kicked when you’re down.