I wake up to a scuffling, snorting sound outside my tent.
My heart starts to pound immediately, and with wide awake eyes, I reach towards my backpack and fish by feel for the hunting knife in it. Withdrawing the gleaming, 9-inch blade and gripping it tighter than necessary, I sit up, wincing at the sound of my sleeping bag's fabric rubbing. My heart pounds in my ears.
There's nothing but thin neoprene between me and the short little shadow outside the tent.
I know to holler and spook an animal so I ROAR, putting all my fear into it.
The little shadow only pauses its movements. Then, something white and cylindrical pushes through the tiny space between the zippers heads.
I want to scream again, this time, in terror. But the white thing is starting to uncurl, and I realize it's a piece of paper. Snatching it up, I glance nervously between it and the shapeless shadow, which is snuffling away.
Adrienne, reads the note in loopy cursive.
I am Madam Truska the Bearded Lady, writing on behalf of Larten Crepsley (stubborn man has refused to learn to write and read for all the time I've known him). When I saw you and he walk into the Cirque last night, I didn't realize who you were. My manners are inexcusable. The tradition of the Cirque is to outfit new members. If you would like, please stop by my tent anytime before Friday to be fitted for your assistant's costume, that you may take the stage with Larten looking sharp.
Larten says your training starts tonight.
I fold the letter and stuff it in a random backpack pocket. My blue death dress is starting to smell like I've lived in it for the last several days.
Take the stage... It never occurred to me, when Crepsley labeled me his assistant, that I would be actually participating in the performance!
Training starts tonight... Great. Combat training with the one person on earth I actually WANT to hurt.
"Whatever," I sigh. "First thing's first. Food."
I'm starving again, the 'light' snack gone. It's dusk, judging by the texture of the light. I slowly unzip the tent to make sure that...thing is gone. Sure enough, I'm alone.
With a quick brush of my teeth, a bandanna around my lank hair, and a hopeless dusting of my torn and frayed death dress, I set out across the meadow, leaving my tent pitched.
Halfway across the waving tan field up to my waist, I see something trampling circuitous and haphazard paths through the grass. It's shorter than the grass, so I can't tell what it is, but it seems to be wandering aimlessly.
"Are you a stray cat?" I query, because it's fairly close. "Or a little lost doggie?"
The rustling halts, triangulating my voice. Then, the grass rapidly starts to part in my direction. Really, really fast I'm going to find out what this thing is.
Backpedalling in deep concern and fear, I don't have time to enact my thoughts of running for it.
There is just enough light to see the thing leap out of the tall grass and clamp onto my torso with four strong limbs.
I shriek in surprise, but it's cut short. The thing - dressed in a long, rough brown robe - isn't hurting me: it's just holding on. I tamp down on my instinct to shove it off, because then it might decide to use claws, if it has them.
"What are you?" I ask, arms askew in an attempt not to touch it.
That's when the gross factor cranks up to eleven. The little hood over the thing's face slides off as it tips its head back to -
"Oh, GOD!" I exclaim. The creature's face is a hideous wrinkled monstrosity of asphalt-cured skin, with no eyes, and no sockets indicating it had ever possessed them. It's nose is remarkably human, and it's toothy grin belies some seriously bad breath.
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," I murmur, stuck fast with horror.
The thing grunts, and gives a little squeeze of my hips with its feet: the same motion used to spur on a horse.
"Ah, I see," I say softly, shakily starting to walk towards the Cirque. "You can't see, so you got lost in the grass." Something along the lines of a hysterical giggle and a whimper escapes my lips. "If I get you there, will you let me go?"
I get another squeeze of my hips in response, and an affirmative grunt.
"You delivered that message for Madam Truska, didn't you?"
He - I assume it's a he, but how the hell do I know? - grunts again. He is snuffling around near my armpit, making me rather nervous, but I suppose he is simply categorizing my scent. "Yeah, I'm one helluva mystery to you, I bet. I'm Adrienne, new half-vampire."
The thing obviously understands me perfectly, and grins garishly up at me again in salutations.
"But what should I call you?" I ask. "Do you have a name?" Whatever the fuck this creature is, did it get a name when it writhed from its cesspool nursery?
The thing shakes its head, readjusting its hold on me.
"How about... Glen? Will that work?"
He bounces and grunts excitedly on my hip, for all the world like a gross toddler. "Glen it is, then." Sensing Glen is not out to harm me, despite looking like Satan's turd, I cautiously wrap my arms around him and take some of the weight off my back.
That is the longest hundred-foot walk of my life. I imagine we're quite an odd sight: with my horrible fashion degradation and this ugly mutant midget hanging off my body like a Halloween-inspired monkey.
But, true to his grunt, Glen drops off my body when we hit the outskirts, scampering off like a gibbon with a tourist's camera.
I put my hands on my knees and try to breathe again.
A pair of messed-up feet come into my downcast field of vision. "Find a friend?" inquires Crepsley with a snicker.
I have to give a disbelieving chuckle. Great sleep, but I'm wide awake now! Unbidden terror: better than any caffeine buzz. "Yeah. His name is Glen."
Crepsley snorts. "We give the Little People much better names than that."
"Little People?"
"The supernatural progeny of Desmond Tiny," says Crepsley with a sneer. "Gods only know how he makes them."
"Who is Desmond Tiny?"
The vampire gives a growl. "You will learn about him, in time. Suffice it to say, avoid a fat man with a wicked gleam in his eye and a penchant for Little People."
Straightening, I look at my mentor. He's dressed in his traditional long red coat and antiquated clothes, but he looks more refreshed and relaxed than the last time he woke up. I didn't take any lights from him: that's probably why. Speaking of which: "Do you mind if I grab a bite before we start to... whatever you have planned?" I ask. I'm not ready to rail against his so-called training regimen yet. I need food to do that.
"Training is a bite, Adrienne," informs the vampire. Turning to walk briskly away, he motions me to follow him across the bridge, away from the Cirque. "We'll be paying a visit to the next town, and feeding."
Mulling that over while I pick my way across the rough wood (I'm still on the barefoot kick), I warn, "I don't feel comfortable with drinking human blood, Mr. Crepsley. I won't do it."
"Yes, so you've said," the vampire sighs. "I won't make you, for now. You'll do it on your own long before I have to force it on you."
"Excuse me?" I say hotly. "Force me to drink blood against my will?"
He stops and regards me like a child throwing a tantrum. "If it was the difference between you really, truly dying and be prying your teeth apart to feed, then yes."
I glower at him in response. His expression reads completely confident in his words. I couldn't change his mind with my arguments, so I'll have to just show him.
Not one inch given to the monster.
The ginger bastard ends our staring contest and we walk on.
Some silence follows, with the quintessential cricketing in the cool spring air and the whisper of breeze in the maples. The dirt road we follow is empty save for us and the pale, waning moon.
"Are we not flitting for a reason?" I query, a pace behind. Not that I'm eager to have such close contact with my personal Resident Asshole.
"Because it's a lovely night," Crepsley replies.
"So, when will I learn to flit?" I ask, skipping up to his side.
"Half-vampires can't flit," he informs. "As I've told you."
Oh, yeah. Just after our blood exchange, he might have mentioned that. I'm unreasonably disappointed. "Well, that sucks," I declare. "Why not just close the deal and make me a full vampire, then?"
"In our world," he replies. "You have to earn the right to become a full vampire."
Great. I feel like my college application has been rejected.
"Of course, the purge will occur in the next couple of decades, regardless," he comments.
"What's that?" I ask. It sounds like vampiric bulimia, and rather unamusing.
"When my blood overtakes your blood, and makes you a full vampire. Like puberty."
"Sounds painful."
"No more than anything else you will experience."
He keeps promising pain. The only pain I've felt so far is in my heart.
"What are you experiencing, so far?" asks Crepsley, his hands in his pockets, like he's just out for a stroll.
He's just keeping tabs on my condition, like a pet, or a babysat child. Doubtful that he really cares. "Um, let's see. Can hear really well, if I focus. The fingernail thing happened almost instantly." My fingers twitch in remembrance of his instigation of this mess. "I'm definitely stronger." Not strong enough fight off a pervert in a rest stop parking lot, but... I pause a beat to rub one of the many scratches on my tender feet with a licked finger. "No healing yet."
"Pity, that," muses the vampire. "Let's test your hearing, shall we? Try to listen for my voice." In a blur of red, he flits off, leaving me in the middle of the dirt road.
I listen closely, focusing my senses, filtering out the breeze and crickets. "The itsy-bitsy spider ran up the water spout..."
"I can hear your horrid singing!" I shout. Then, to prove it, "Down came the rain and washed the spider out!" Years of church choir pay off: no pitch problems for me.
Another pause, presumably while he flits further away. This time, his voice is fainter. "Out came the sun and dried up all the rain..."
"And the itsy-bity spider went up the spout again!" I conclude.
In two seconds, he's whipping to a halt in front of me, a crease in his brow.
"What?" I ask, trying not to laugh to his face at his bad singing.
"I was over a mile away, Adrienne."
I shrug, trying not to be too pleased with myself. "Sound carries well in the country like this."
"Adrienne," he is trying to get through to me. "I was whispering."
My eyes go wide. "You were not, no way!"
"Yes, I was. You clearly are well-progressed in some respects, but sorely lacking in others." Compliment and insult, rolled into one. With a flick of his coat, he continues to walk. "Once you get some blood in you, you might break through the plateau."
I snort. "Don't count on it."
"What else are you experiencing? Any more blackened veins?"
"No." I pause for a moment. Should I tell him about the lights? It's the opportune time, but something in me insists upon secrecy.
"Can you see in the dark?" he asks. Pointing across a deep field of heather, he says, "Try counting those deer."
I squint. "There are deer out there?" I can see shadows, but not forms.
Crepsley holds up a finger for me to wait, then blurs off into the night.
In a matter of seconds, I can hear hooves galumphing towards me. The deer in question burst out of the brush, dashing madly across the dirt road. "WHOA!" I exclaim, sidestepping a heavy doe with wild eyes. A buck follows her up, laboriously swinging his multi-tined rack, and then two more does.
Finally, a fawn blunders out of the brush, clears the ditch with a leap, and lands awkwardly on one spindly leg. With a plaintive bleat he goes down hard, struggling maniacally to get up again, but his leg will not obey him.
I dash to the fawn's side as Crepsley emerges from the brush last, picking leaves out of his hair and coat. Taking in the sight of me gathering up the tiny, struggling deer in my arms, he says, "You can't keep him. He's wounded."
"I can nurse him," I insist.
Crepsley runs a ginger hand down the fawn's dangling leg. The deer makes a groaning sound and renews his struggles, and the vampire's hand comes away bloody. "He has a broken leg."
"Says who?" I fire back, cuddling the creature closer. I can hear his tiny heart thundering, feel it against the palm of my hand. I can smell the blood from the broken bone protruding through his fur. Oh, wow, that smells good...
"It is his place in the scheme of nature to die if injured," says Crepsley, the pillar of reason. "He must become food for something else higher on the food chain."
I don't like where this is going, but the scent of cloying iron is distracting. "What do you mean?" I ask grudgingly.
"You don't want to drink from a human tonight? Then drink from him."
I look down at the mammal, heaving in its speckled pelt. There is something wet on my hand, and I turn it over to find it is sticky blood, dark in the moonlight. Shifting the deer, I bring the hand to my nose and whiff. Not unpleasant. And I feel rather hungry, all of a sudden.
Some part of me calls to protect this little animal. Another part of me sees my own predatory self reflected in his black eyes.
He's just an animal. He's prey.
Instinct makes the decision for me.
I bring a fingernail to bear under the deer's ear, puncturing his skin. His struggles barely register as I home in on his veins.
Losing myself is easy. I'm hungry, and with every swallow, I feel less so. It occurs to me, distantly, that I could balance my slaking with this deer's life. I could meet our desires in the middle: my satiation, and his will to live.
But he won't live, anyway, admits my beast nature. I blink at its voice, unused to it as I am. Survive, it encourages me. And the sentiment doesn't feel morally wrong. It feels justified.
The fawn is limp in my hands by the time I surface. I hear its heart peeter out, and another spirit is gone from the world.
"If you put him in a tree," says Crepsley. "We'll pick him up on the way home, so the Cirque can use the meat."
That sounds like a really good idea. The guilt rising up in me is assuaged marginally. "Waste not, want not," I agree quietly, walking to a low-hanging branch and nestling the dead fawn in the crook. I leave a lingering stroke on his cooling fur, a thank you he will never understand or feel.
"Come along," says Crepsley. "Time to see how real vampires do it."