That night, I break camp and move deeper into the woods, beyond the reach of the casual seeker. My grief escalates, and I realize the wound of losing my family has festered for too long: it's infected.
As I dash tears from my face, I throw camouflage over my tent. I rip young pines out of the ground with explosive shouts, tear arm-thick limbs from mature trees, layer upon layer of defense against the world. In no time, my living space looks like a beaver dam.
When exhaustion finds me on all fours in the middle of the woods, surrounded by my destruction, I crawl into my nested tent and collapse. Dreams of my family haunt me, but their faces have already started to blur from remembrance.
Unlike any other time in my life, when I wake up, my pain is still there, spearing my heart. I stagger out of my tent and follow my ears to a creek, washing the makeup off my face. For the first time in recent memory, I take off my clothes and bathe, scrubbing down with handfuls of green pine needles. Then I lay on the soft, sandy bed and let the current flow over me, whisk away my tears.
I'm still for so long that an opossum waddles to the creek edge and doesn't notice me. Before I can even register, I've leaped from the water and ripped into the mammal's grey fur, sucking on the cuts I make even as I hold its screaming mouth closed with one hand. My hunger flares to unbearable levels at the taste of blood, and the life-giving liquid pours down my swollen throat. I drain the very life out of that opossum, and when I raise my head from its cold carcass, I see the three little snouts poking out of its pouch.
I feel so guilty. I'm little more than an animal with blood on my hands. For hours I cry, mourning my trespass against the innocent little opossum babies who mewl for their mother. It takes me all day to work up the courage to kill them, lest time cruelly prolong their suffering.
A sort of strange, disconnected calm comes over me as I carry the dead family back to my camp by their hairless tails. I'm a howling, empty void: cried out for the time being. It makes my thoughts astonishingly clear and coldly logical. I feel like a murderer, worse than when I drank from that fawn.
But I can do nothing about it, now. I killed them.
I am at an internal crossroads, standing naked in the deep woods, considering their stiffening forms at my feet. I can regret taking the lives of animals (not humans, never humans!) for sustenance, and compound my emotional agony. Or, I can choose to honor their sacrifice towards letting me live. Me! Undeserving, unloved me!
In the interest of not confusing my pain, I decide on the latter.
Within an hour, falling dusk illuminates four animal hides stretched on a fallen tree: three small, one large. My campfire has the same size arrangement of roasting meat.
That night, I contemplate my full stomach. If this way of life forced upon me requires some breaking of my personal ethos, then I would rather animals be my victims than humans. Clearly, their blood sustains me just as well.
The lights and the special brand of hunger they inspire come to mind. I wonder how I'll be able to sate that need, if I deny contact with anything but animals. It is clear I cannot take that energy, whatever it is, from non-sentient creatures.
I'll have to cross that bridge when I come to it, I think, drifting off. The pain in my heart feels slightly calcified, like an aging scar: impossible to ignore.
The next morning, I find the first strands of silver in my hair, my locks burned gray by grief.
I put myself on a morbid schedule. While I am hunting or foraging, I box away my pain. Any other time is fair game for it to run rampant.
I find my photo album in the bottom of my pack, and that's just a treasure to my tired lungs and stuffy nose and ripped heart. Knowing that I am dead to my family makes me feel actually dead, and it's horrible.
Over and over, I am forced to ride the ragged edge of my sanity, swept away in a tide of razors and nails. My only comfort is that they are alive, and that they will eventually move on.
And that's the kicker, really. They haven't died, I did. I may not be able to see them ever again, but I can dream and remember (as I stroke the photos with sooty fingers).
Maybe it's the vampirism having a metaphysical effect on me, but somewhere in the beginning of the second week, I look up to realize that I've accomplished a lot while I mourned. I've set up snare lines in the game trails, trot lines in the river, scouted the patches of edible greens and berries. I know when the deer move, how often to avoid a certain ridge where a bobcat comes, and am starting to decode birdsong. I know what water is good, what certain clouds mean for weather, and how to rekindle my fire from next to nothing.
I put my hands on my hips and laugh and laugh. For the first time, it occurs to me that I am, in fact, alive. And if I can eek out this much from sterile, unforgiving woods, then I can certainly whip my battered heart into shape.
Toughen up, girl, becomes my new internal chant. My food supply is a slim margin that fluctuates wildly with the weather, animal discovery, and other factors. Six meals out of ten, I have too little or nothing at all to eat.
My green and blue scrap skirt looks even more scrappy, now. But somehow, it suits me.
Too distracted by a lost snare to examine the clouds, I get caught far from my shelter in a heavy, cool spring downpour. It soaks me to the bone and chills me even further, and I cannot make a fire in it to dry out. I shiver in my tent for hours, anxiously worrying about catching cold despite my vampiric immunity. It is just the kind of wet, cold misery that compounds my existing woes.
The vampire blood in me wins out: I spike a fever during the night, but it breaks in a rush of sweat that has me sighing with relief. I know for certain that if I had been fully human, I would have caught pneumonia and died.
I start to hone my newly reformed body into a survival tool. Daily, I run barefoot through the woods. By the end of week two, my feet are leathery rough and impenetrable. My nails are extremely hard, and I mark out my 'territory' against other animals like the rare puma, whose tracks I have seen twice. In the process of scratching the bark off trees, my nails gain a razor edge that serves me well in skinning the animals I trap, gutting fish, and more.
Beyond the stark day-to-day (well, night-to-night, thanks to the blood diet) living, I test the limits of my body's capacity. Those sharp nails become handy climbing tools. In a few nights' time, I discover my physical prowess is heightened with a steady diet of blood, and I strive to drive it higher still. I practice jumping, running. My distance stamina increases tenfold, and my leaps become Olympian.
Can I leap that distance from tree to tree, over twenty feet? It turns out, I can.
Can I chase a deer and slap it's hindquarters? I can. They're the slower creatures, now.
Can I find the narrowest cracks in a rock, fit my nails to them, and scale the face with grace? I can.
Can I lift that rain-soaked log, as big around as my arms? I can, with some effort. A wild sort of pride settles in me at my progress.
Knockout gas breath, flitting, and night vision still elude me. It's annoying to be a creature based nocturnally, but handicapped to only four senses. My hearing helps me compensate, but you can't hear swaths of dandelion greens. As it turns out, you can smell them, however, once you crush them underfoot.
It is looming that Crepsley hasn't sought me out yet, but I'll be damned if I look a gift horse in the mouth. Every night I can go without seeing his scarred face and orange hair is a victory.
Asshat. I'd be thrilled if he never shows up again, even if I wistfully remember how his lights tasted. Food takes the edge off, and so does animal blood, but the recurring hunger for those undulating scarves of light returns each time a little stronger.
The bear whose tracks I've seen next to the stream makes a surprise appearance. I'm picking wild sour blackberries, crawling through a convenient tunnel beneath the thorny canes, when I look up at a huff of fetid breath across my nape. Scary brown eyes in a black-furred face greet me. For one long second, the bear and I just stare at each other: me on all fours looking up, he on all fours looking down. The tension snaps as he roars deafeningly, but I'm already backpedalling in fright.
He stomps forward, bellowing, chasing me out of the brushy tunnel with long yellow teeth wide open. Just as I make it to my feet, he charges.
I have no idea how I make it through that fight. It's the kind of too-quick, terrified blur that is one wrong move from death, a single misstep from dismemberment or tragedy. My closest memory is my own sharp scream, an underhand stab with my knife, and hot, oily black fur wrapped around muscle barreling me clean over.
The next thing I know, I'm crouched over the bear as it huffs its last hollow breath, blood soaking my clawed fingers buried in its throat and my blade imbedded in its chest.
"Sorry, dude," I gasp, and mean it. "I guess my claws were meaner."
I come out with a gash on my leg, a roadmap of scratches from my hasty retreat, and a full stomach of meat for a solid week, plus smoked jerky.
Eating copious amounts of the gamey meat almost makes up for the nagging, gnawing hunger that I know only light, ephemeral sustenance will alleviate.
I am given solitude for the rest of the moon's cycle before Crepsley wanders into my camp a little after dusk one lunar-bright eve. "That smells good," he says.
"Your nonchalance is revolting," I reply blandly, poking at the fire under a large snapping turtle on the half-shell. Relenting, I motion towards one of the logs I rolled around the firepit as my last line of defense from burning down the forest. "Sit, if you want."
He does, flicking his long coat behind him. "Madam Truska is worried about you."
Appealing to my newest friendship will do you no good. "Tell her not to," I reply simply.
Crepsley eyes the bearskin tacked onto a tree to cure. "I will be able to do that, I believe." He shifts forward, scrutinizing me neutrally. "Have you reconsidered?" my mentor asks, placid as a glass lake.
"No. I have not."
Crepsley is quiet for a long minute, staring into the fire. Is it possible he's being more careful with how he treats me, now that he knows I have a snapping point? "I still have responsibilities regarding your apprenticeship as a vampire," he says finally.
My expression pinches in a grimace. Fuck, I had hoped to wait just a little longer. I guess three and a half weeks was my limit of freedom from my constraining teacher.
"Chiefly, you have yet to learn to feed as a vampire does," continues Crepsley.
"Then what do you call that suburbs family?" I retort.
"A demonstration. You did not lay lips on them yourself."
I scowl at my knees, reddened by the fire's proximity. It is so incredibly frustrating to have pressure thrown back onto me, just as I escape it! I know Crepsley's just going to hound me about it, though, if I ignore him. But I can't handle the thought of cutting into a human being. Animals are one thing, but something that looks like me? I remember the suburbanites, the creeper at the rest stop... "No," I reply as evenly as I can, poking the fire again without looking at him. "I won't do it."
I can feel the timbre of his growl. "My patience wears thin with your brattiness, Adrienne. You must accept what you are."
"What I am," I snap, "Is an abomination. I'm drinking animal blood and getting along just fine. What more do I need?"
"You can not live off animals forever," Crepsley replies coldly. "You will go insane with bloodlust and kill the first person you come across. Is that what you want?"
"Of course not!" I shout, rising to my feet.
He rises too, imposingly tall and steely-eyed. He stares me down for a long minute as my hands twitch at my sides, itching to take a swipe at him. He eventually breaks the standoff by digging in his pocket for two glass vials. "In all my centuries," he scoffs. "I have never heard of a mentor doing his apprentice's hunting."
"Like I give a whit about your species," I sneer.
In a millisecond, his clawed hand has spanned my jaw, forcing me to look into his face. The cool smooth glass of the vials makes me expect a counterpoint of his sharp nails, but he carefully keeps from even scratching me. I am both angered by his assertion of dominance and humbled that he dares not prick my skin, even in his annoyance. "This is the one and only time," he begins, low enough to make me strain to hear him. "That you will avoid your training in feeding. Next time I go to feed, you will come with me. I have a duty to prepare you to be a full vampire, one day." He drops his iron hand. "But I also have a duty to keep you alive," he finishes, extending one of the vials.
I slowly, warily take the glass tube. Okay, maybe I'm hungrier than I thought. Seeing the liquid glint dark red in the fire makes my mouth water for more than turtle stew. And yeah, maybe I'm cowed a little by Crepsley's intensity. A duty...
As I uncork the vial and attempt measured sips, Crepsley expounds upon his earlier statement. "Now that you are capable of actually putting up a fight, that is what we are going to do."
I smack my lips as the vial empties, feeling the power thrum through me like someone plugged me in. The difference between human and animal blood is like night and day. My body sings to forgotten awareness. Animal blood may keep me going, but human blood lets me live.
The conundrum of Crepsley's overbearing caretaking and the antagonistic way he undertakes it proves suitable fuel for my fighting spirit. "I'm so beyond down for that," I reply toothily.
Crepsley's eyes spark in the fire. "You get the other vial if you manage to land a kill strike."
"If?" I echo sweetly.
He smirks and, as expected, digs in his feet in preparation to flit towards me. By the time he does, I've achieved a fine superhuman leap clean over his head, and land on the other side of the fire, laughing at his surprised face. "But wait, there's more!" I holler goadingly.
As we engage in mock combat for the second time in our relationship, I find a certain primal joy in using my honed climbing and jumping skills. Using my tough feet and sharp toenails to run-climb a tree, then kick off a blow towards his head is even more satisfying when he has to dodge ungracefully. I stay out of his range as much as possible, forcing him to chase me down (or rather, up) when he wants to land a hit. He might have me beat in strength and speed, but I know which of us has more Tarzan practice!
"Excellent!" he bellows.
I land in the large arms of an oak, where I jumped to avoid his swipe. "Come on, old man!"
Maybe it's the blood talking, but I fucking love when our desperation for the upper hand drives us to the ground, where I can roar and snarl and struggle under his weight even though I lose the round. Winning is more important than any perceived sexuality of the buck, the twist of hips, the arch of a strong spine, the grip of knees. I snap my teeth at his throat, making him jerk back and give me just enough room to wriggle free.
There is a light of begrudged pride in his eyes when, after a solid hour and three pins, I finally manage to point my claws at his heart, sitting on his stomach.
Feral nature won't let me budge, nor him, but he reaches into his pocket to hand me my prize. With my pulse pounding and my nails pricking his chest, I thumb the cork out and down the blood in one champion's swallow.
Astoundingly, as I swing off his belly, I find myself calmed. Some of the crazed storm of emotion in me is quieted by this combat. Good to know there's something in the world that can soothe me.
I'm even cordial enough to extend him a hand. My canteen hangs from a branch, and I pass it to him first. As he swigs gratefully, I find words bubbling up that make me internally balk at my own friendliness. "Turtle stew?"
And even more balk-worthy, he replies, "Why not?"
I'm still damned to make small talk, but we manage to keep an amicable air as we pass the shell back and forth, slurping, making fun of his swelling eye and my bruising neck from when he slammed me to the ground. When he leaves, I am savagely pleased to see him limping slightly. My dirty footprints span his coat's shoulders, and I snicker.
Granted, I'm limping far worse, but it's the principle of the matter. He'll have to drag ass through the Cirque looking like he got the shit beat out of him, because he did. That thought is going to keep me smiling for days, I just know it.
That day, I dream of a solid waist between my knees, the fan of harsh breath over my face, and a dull ache between my legs that has nothing to do with the exertion. I wake up confused, because I know for a fact I despise Crepsley. Don't I? Play fighting and a shared meal can't possibly wreak that much change.
The horniness (I'll call it what it is) mixes me up emotionally until I explain it away by attributing it to the persistent hunger squalling in my belly for those mystery lights. It is the first time I draw a line between lust and the lights, but I have a sneaking, worrisome suspicion that it won't be the last.