AN: Thank you so much for the reviews! LOL...I think everyone kind of gets what's happening here (Except for poor P in the story!)...


Chapter 2

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The steady sound of water dripping nearby caused Penelope to stir on the terribly uncomfortable bed she was lying on. Her bed was a pile of pillows, blankets, nighttime squeeze creatures, and a comforter, not this scratchy, flat rock. She wondered where her pillow was and why she felt so uber cold. Even if she had kicked off the blankets while she was sleeping, she wouldn't have felt this cold. Had she fallen asleep with the window open last night?

Grumbling, she rolled over and clunked her head against something hard and unforgiving. Reaching out with her hand to decipher what had ended up in her bed, she felt…

Concrete?

Immediately, Penelope's eyes flew open, and she scrambled to sit up. The world was terribly blurry and magnified in intense, near hallucinogenic images.

Glasses...she must've lost her glasses.

She reached up to her face and felt that her glasses were in place. She frowned and then removed them…and could see crystal clear. She hadn't been able to see without her glasses since she was five years old, and even then it had been blurry. Had she fallen, hit her head, and suddenly could see? She'd heard of that happening to some people, even saw that on a television show one time years ago. Maybe that was it.

Groggily, she looked around and saw that she was sitting in the middle of the alley on the west side of her building. It had to be where she was; she recognized the rather ugly fire escapes and potted plants of her neighboring complex.

As she turned her head to get a better view, a dull ache shot through her neck. She reached her hand up to rub it, but it didn't help assuage the ache. With a grimace, she rubbed her neck some more and tried to bring her thoughts in order. Nothing was making sense at all.

What in the world had happened to her?

Penelope gave up trying to think her way out of this mess; it just wasn't going to work with how punch drunk she was feeling. She needed to get moving, get her energy circulating, and get in her apartment. As she brought her hand back down from her sore neck, she looked at it and saw two dull red smears of blood. Normally, the sight of blood made her squeamish, frightened, and made her stomach ache, but it didn't this time. She had the strangest, most disgusting urge she'd ever had in her life.

The urge to lick those spots away.

Suddenly, the last few hours came back to her, and she began to tremble. She'd been attacked! Some man, some thing, had jumped out of the alley and knocked her flat. He'd choked her, hard, nearly breaking her neck, and had knocked her head into the pavement repeatedly. Was it a robbery? She looked around and saw that her purse and her other items were strewn around, so that wasn't the attacker's intent...

Even more panic soared through her body as she thought of the worst thing possible. Oh, God! Had he raped her?

Praying as she glanced quickly down her body, Penelope saw that her clothes were intact. She could even feel her panties. She could feel everything really intensely—including the fishnet of her tights felt nearly chafing against her legs.

He'd bitten her. She suddenly remembered that he'd bitten her, hard, on the neck. That was the last thing she could remember. What kind of crazy attacker knocked women down in alleys and bit their neck? Like some sort of vampire…

Penelope touched her neck again, carefully this time. When she saw the imprint, it was two perfect dots, spaced only a couple of inches apart…directly where her pulse should've been...

Should've been?

Panicking, she reached her hand up again to her throat, trying desperately to feel for a pulse. There was nothing. Nothing under her fingers; nothing at all. She reached for her wrist, tried the area there, and then tried squeezing her finger to make blood pool and turn purple.

Nothing happened.

She had to be mistaken, or she was dead. She couldn't be dead...

Penelope felt her stomach lurch to her throat. Quickly, she scrambled to her knees and began to expel the contents of her stomach. There wasn't much there; she'd been dieting recently to fit in a new designer skirt she'd bought. She gagged and gagged, and then she sat back on her heels and did the thing that was the most logical to her at the moment...

She began to cry.

Good God, what in the hell was going on? This had to be a joke. A really horrible joke played on her by someone who didn't like her very much. Or a bad dream.

"If I am being punked, I've had enough," she called out, her voice hoarse and scratchy. She immediately coughed and then spat.

Somehow, from the depths of her being, she had a feeling this was real, and she knew she needed to act. She dragged her victim's advocacy training out of her subconcious and started gathering thoughts. Wracking her brain, she reached for her purse. She needed to call the police, call Derek... He'd tell the team, and they would catch this guy and fix her so she could go on with her life—

What life? You don't have a pulse.

That thought stopped her from doing anything else. She reached for her neck again, and still, there was nothing. Oh God... She was dead, she had to be...a ghost.

But she could breathe, she could think, and she could spit and throw up...and not ectoplasm like Ghostbusters ghosts. She didn't crave brains like a zombie. Instead, she thought blood looked tasty, and she had a bite mark on her neck...

Penelope shook her head and started to smile a little bit. This was crazy. This was a crazy dream. This had to be a dream. What she was thinking was not logical at all—could dead people think?—so thinking really didn't count.

Because what she was thinking was a vampire had attacked her…in Quantico…at seven PM at night.

A freaking vampire.

Rising to her feet, she swayed slightly. She felt woozy, and her stomach ached. She was hungry, and she was freezing. She'd probably been attacked, but she wasn't dead. That was certifiably nuts. Soon, she would wake up in her bed, and everything would be fine. Like the children book said, this was a bad, bad, terrible, no good, awful dream.

She stumbled through the alley to her apartment, grabbing her purse out of pure habit, and climbed the stairs to her landing. She wished Morgan were here. He could hold her and make her much warmer and tell her that everything was going to be okay. No one made things better like Derek did.

As she entered her apartment, she cranked the heat and then stumbled to the kitchen. She opened her refrigerator and reached for some leftover lo mein she'd had for lunch yesterday. She opened the container, and her stomach roiled. There was a terrible smell to it, like nothing she'd ever smelled before. Sour, cloying, and beyond nasty, it coated her tongue and her throat and made her gag again.

Quickly, she tossed it into a garbage bag and sealed it, getting the stink away from her. That food had gone rancid in a remarkably short period of time. Maybe that was why she was feeling so awful and having bad dreams…because she had acute food poisoning.

Reaching into her fridge, she pulled out the cheese. She had a nice block of cheddar; that would make her feel better. As she opened it, that same horrific smell started to rise and overtake her. She threw the cheese back in the fridge and swallowed the saliva that had pooled in her mouth.

Penelope rubbed her arms, trying desperately to warm up, but nothing was helping. She checked her thermostat; her apartment was at eighty degrees now.

Making her way to the bathroom, she looked into the mirror.

Her skin, usually a healthy pink, was beyond pale. She had a grayish pallor that screamed unhealthy to any living person. Her eyes were dull, the whites incredibly white without any red veins at all. She turned her head to the side and looked at her neck. The two puncture marks were extremely visible against her deathly pale skin.

All the facts, as crazy as they seemed to be, came rushing to her foggy brain. She had no pulse. Food disgusted her. She had an unnatural pallor and a bite mark that signified what she still couldn't believe.

Vampire.

"No way," she whispered to herself, feeling panic rising again. "No freaking way."

She startled a bit as she looked at herself in the mirror. She had a reflection. Vampires aren't supposed to have reflections, so maybe...maybe...

At that moment, Penelope heard birds chirping. The sun would be coming over the horizon soon. She didn't know how much of vampire lore was true, but she had a feeling something about sunlight wasn't good. That seemed to show up in every story she'd ever read, besides Twilight. She didn't want to find out by frying like a burnt piece of toast in the sun's rays.

Now sparkling…that would be all right.

As quickly as she could, she pulled all of her blinds and shut her curtains. She didn't really believe this was happening, but just in case…

It seemed to take her forever to get that task done, but she finally closed the last blind. She felt so tired, like she could barely raise her head. Sleepy. She needed to sleep. This was all just a dream. A vampire with a reflection...who ever heard of such a thing? She would wake up...and like any good TV drama, she'd find Bobby Ewing standing in her shower.

She giggled—a strange, nearly hysterical sound—as she crawled into her bed. She huddled the blankets around her in an attempt to get warm. At least she hadn't lost her sense of humor.