Kokoa poked at the vegetable salad she had been given as part of her school lunch. She had actually bought it with the intention of eating it, even saving it for last after her rice and chicken. It was one of the few things that Kokoa was willing to admit to herself somewhat embarrassed her; she was a vampire who actively liked vegetables, some of them even more than meat. There were no real rules about it in vampire society, none that she had ever heard of at least, but it always seemed wrong to her for some reason.
Regardless, she had planned to enjoy the medley of sprouts and carrots, but when she finally got around to trying some she found herself disappointed. They were all very limp and some of the slivers tasted like they had been improperly cleaned. It was unworthy of her time and appetite. But despite this she still had to eat. She twirled the salad around in its little bowl, using her chopsticks to push it along the edges.
Because that disappointment hadn't been enough of a drag on her lunch break, she also had to deal with the inane chatter of a trio of girls who occupied the other half of the lunch table she had chosen to sit at.
Seriously, who cares about how your old teachers were or what your last school uniform was like? Kokoa asked herself. I swear those idiots are only talking to hear the sound of their own voice. It wasn't like Kokoa could just ignore them. They were talking so loudly and their voices were all so screechy that try as she might she just couldn't tune them out. She considered asking them to quiet down, but that would require acknowledging their existence. She had also thought about moving to a different table, but that would mean admitting defeat. So, she stayed, enduring their prattle along with her hunger.
Kokoa picked up another bite of the vegetable salad. She held it in front of her eyes, watching the long sprouts dangle and regretting not including lunch in her deal with the foreigner. Speaking of the foreigner; Kokoa glanced around the cafeteria, spotting him and checking to see if he was being attacked by anything. Nope, he was still in the exact same situation as he was in last time she checked on him, sitting alone at a table and reading a book. Kokoa felt a new pang of annoyance. She thought that she would at least get an excuse for some action as a side benefit of the deal they had made yesterday, but so far no one had bothered him. Granted this was probably mainly due to a lack of opportunity in class.
It was the second friday of the school year, the end of the first real work week they had had. As such, the teacher had decided it would be a good idea to give a test covering every subject he had talked about for the last fortnight, and have that take up the entire first half of the day. The whole class was very focused on it, even the slackers were giving it their full attention as they tried to recall what the teacher had said as they slept. Of course, Kokoa had had no problem on the test. She ignored the memories of how quickly her knee had been bouncing and the hole she had almost bitten in her lip as she took it.
Even if someone had wanted to cause trouble during the test, a bad idea given how closely the teacher watched the class to make sure he could catch any cheater, the foreigner wasn't in the room. He had been forced to take the test in another room for some reason that Kokoa couldn't be bothered to speculate on.
There suddenly came a disturbance from the other side of the lunchroom. Kokoa glanced at it and saw that the cause, to her complete lack of surprise, was the pinkette and that group she hung out with as they began trying to pull the human apart. This sight was so commonplace that she couldn't even muster up the sorrow to bury her face in her hands anymore at her sister's body being involved in such a ridiculous act. The rests of the student in the lunchroom felt the same way apparently, as almost no one was paying them any heed anymore.
I swear Moka, I will find a way to free you from that curse, Kokoa thought, reaffirming her resolve. She realized that she hadn't checked on the foreigner in a couple minutes. She turned the other way, expecting to find him still in the same position. Instead, she saw him turned around in his seat to face a large, burly third-year.
"You stop, please?" said the foreigner. In response the third-year grabbed a small chunk of rice off of his table and threw it at the foreigner. The lump bounced off his chest and hit the ground, joining other morsel that had also presumably been thrown.
The third year spoke. "What are you gonna do about it Gaijin? You gonna finally throw a punch?" Apparently, stories about the non-responsive foreigner had spread throughout the school.
The foreigner started to make like he was going to get up, and Kokoa felt a cold shock jump through her system. This was the type of thing she was supposed to be stopping, and if she failed then she wouldn't get anymore of his blood. She couldn't possibly go back to blood packs now, even if she hadn't dumped them all in the toilet. She had to act quickly.
"Hey!" said one of the prattling idiots across from Kokoa, responding to the vampire grabbing a plate off of her tray. Kokoa ignored her, there was no way she was wasting food she had paid for on what she was about to do.
Kokoa flinged the contents of the plate at the head of the upperclassman. It hit him as he was winding back a bowl to fling at the foreigner. He stopped mid-motion and turned, murder in his eyes and rice on his forehead, to see who dared do such a thing.
"You're starting to annoy me," said Kokoa, loud enough to be heard over the bustle of the cafeteria. "Stop doing that before I go over there and show you your-"
Kokoa found out what had been in the bowl the upperclassman was aiming at the foreigner. She had gotten a very good look at its contents as it sped at her chest. It was confirmed by the smell of miso that was now wafting up from the front of her shirt.
Kokoa's eyes widened and her jaw dropped agape. She looked down and pulled her shirt out in front of her, its newly acquired large, dark, and slowly spreading stain confirming to her that she hadn't imagined it. She looked up. She saw the smug smile of the imbecile who had thrown the soup at her, his mouth beginning to open.
Then, the dam burst. Kokoa felt a blaze light inside of her as her body began producing more youkai than ever before. She reached once more for the tray of the girl next to her.
What followed could have been minutes, it could have been hours, for all Kokoa knew it could even have been days. Time lost all meaning to her as she gave herself over to her rage.
Food flew everywhere as more and more students joined into the fray. The once white walls of the cafeteria were slowly dyed with every sickly shade imaginable of brown, green, yellow and red. Kokoa's entire world became grabbing whatever thing she could find on a nearby plate, or snatch out of the air, and throwing it. In her mind she was aiming every little molecular morsel dead on at the bastard who had not only stained her clothes, but also managed to disrespect not just her, but the Shuzen name, no, the entire vampire race. Her anger blinded her to the fact that, in reality, she was just throwing food in every conceivable direction.
Kokoa suddenly felt something new, a tap on her shoulder. She turned on her heel, arm raised and ready to throw a punch at who ever was stupid enough to come with range of her fist. It was just luck that she had happened to turn to look at the face of the dumbass and, even through her haze, recognized it as the foreigner. Her instinct for preserving her food source kicked in, making her try to at least divert the punch as it was too far along to stop completely. For a scary second, Kokoa thought she might not have been fast enough as she watched her hand get closer to the foreigner's cheek. However, Kokoa had clearly underestimated herself as the punch failed to connect.
The foreigner appeared nonplussed at how close he had come having his head knocked off. He looked Kokoa in the eye and began to speak. It was at this moment that the young vampire realised three things. She was somehow at eye level with the foreigner, which should have been impossible due to their height difference. This lead directly into her next discovery; over the course of her battlerage, she had for some reason decided that it made the most strategic sense to climb up and stand on top of a lunch table in the center of the room. Expending the mental energy required to register those facts made her calm down enough to make her third discovery; High school food fights are really fucking loud.
Kokoa could barely hear herself think, let alone what the foreigner was saying. She jumped down off the lunch table, nearly slipping on some orange chunks that had landed on the floor, but she managed to catch herself on the table before she fell. After checking around the room to see if she could discover who had dropped/thrown the offending fruit so she could take her revenge on them, and totally not too make sure no one had seen her nearly make an idiot of herself, she turned her attention back to the foreigner.
"What?" Kokoa asked. The foreigner bent down and cupped his hands around his mouth, amplifying his voice a bit.
"The lunch lady just left. How much you wanna bet that she went to go get the headmaster to punish whoever started this whole mess? Let's go, now."
"What?!" Kokoa turned and looked at him in shock. "Leave! Now!? Turn and run without getting my revenge on the bastard who dared throw a full bowl of soup at an elite-!"
"He left a long time ago," the foreigner said. "Like we should be, unless you wanna get into trouble?"
It pained Kokoa to flee a battle, even one as stupid as this, but he was right. As unbefitting as it would be for a member of the vampire elite to run, it would be an even greater strike against her race to get in trouble for starting a food fight, even if she was, as she felt, completely justified. "Okay."
"Great." The foreigner turned and began heading towards the door.
"Wait!" Kokoa said, her vampiric senses picking up something. "I hear people coming. We need another way out."
The foreigner looked around. "Windows!" The pair rushed to a once-clear set of the glass plates and forced them open, jumping out as soon as they had enough room. Luckily, the cafeteria was only one floor up, so they only dropped about twelve feet. Kokoa landed on her feet, while the foreigner hit the ground and rolled. "Run!" he said as they heard the noise inside the cafeteria stop, assuming it to be because of the headmaster's entrance.
The pair dashed off, heading towards the tree-studded horizon.
-Inside the Dead Forest-
After running full tilt for several minutes, and now safely hidden among the leafless trees, the duo finally stopped.
Kokoa found a nice stump to sit on as she sucked in air, not even giving a passing thought to trying to look dignified. The foreigner just collapsed, sitting down hard onto the floor and laying back as soon as his butt hit dirt. For a few seconds, the only sound in the dead woods came from the two teenagers gasping for breath.
Then, laughter.
It started with the foreigner, small hiccups escaping from his throat in between gasps of air. Soon they grew louder, turning into full blown chuckles as he covered his face with his hands. Kokoa couldn't help joining in, feeling the tension escape her body, seemingly carried out by her giggles. Together, they began guffawing uncontrollably, Kokoa's eyes closing as tears began to form.
Their sudden throes of mirth continued for minutes, almost bringing them to the point of needing to gasp for air again. All good things come to an end however, and eventually, just as gradually as it started, the laughter died down. Kokoa leaned back on her stump, eyes closed, feeling the sunshine pour onto her gently smiling face, her mind completely blank for the first time in years. The foreigner's hands had shifted from being on his face to behind his head as he gazed up at the clouds through the bare branches of the forest. The only acknowledgement of time's continuing existence was the gentle swelling and contracting of their chests.
"You know what?" the foreigner asked as he sat up. He turned to face Kokoa. "I don't think I'm going back to class today."
-Somewhere on the Outskirts of Campus-
It had been almost two hours since the food fight had happened and they had made their daring escape. In that time they had managed to go back to the girls dorm for Kokoa to change into clothes that didn't reek, go to the boys dorms so the foreigner could put his book away, and then wander every single inch of the perimeter of Youkai Academy's vast campus. Nearly two hours. If you were to ask either one of them how long it had been, they'd say it had maybe been ten minutes.
After they had circumnavigated the grounds, Kokoa had the idea that they could just head in a random direction and turn whenever they felt like it. They walked around, enjoying the warm friday as it was meant to be enjoyed, chatting idly outside in the sun, not in a stuffy classroom getting lectured at.
The foreigner spent much of the time telling Kokoa stories of what he had done back in the U.S.A.. The current one was of the first time he had cut class, when he was eleven.
"So we had really wanted to watch this movie, I can't even remember what it was now, and it came out on a friday. We didn't want to wait to watch it until saturday, so we decided that we would go to school and get logged into the attendance, then leave when we had the chance. We thought we would go out, see the movie, and then get back.
"We took the bus all around town, trying to get to this theater. See, Steven had printed out a sheet of directions the other day, and we were following him following those. Or we thought he was following those."
"He didn't have the directions?" Kokoa asked.
"No, he had them. They were even right. But he wasn't. The first step was getting onto the twenty-three inbound. We went to the street corner, saw the bus across the street, and thought that was our bus, because it was there already." Kokoa made a confused face at this logic. "Yeah, I know," said the foreigner "We were dumb kids. So anyway, we hopped on and rode that bus for twenty minutes in the exact wrong direction. We never even realized it, we rode all the way to the terminal at the end and, since we were told to get off, assumed it was our stop and that everyone else was going to watch the movie too.
"We went out and then spent almost an hour trying to find a street that was across town."
Kokoa laughed. "That's what you deserve for following someone blindly like that."
"Yeah, yeah, rub it in," the foreigner said in mock hurt, ruined by his smile. "So anyways, we eventually figured out we were lost and found our ways back home unharmed."
"Your parents didn't have to find you?" Kokoa asked.
"Nope, we weren't that dumb. But that was the problem.
"You see, we didn't take into account the fact that our parents thought we were at school, so when they tried to pick us up and didn't find us, they threw a fit! The school was swarmed with cops, all the teachers were being interrogated, we had caused pandemonium and we had no idea. It wasn't until our parents came home, way late at night, that we found out what had happened."
"How much trouble did you get in?" Kokoa asked gleefully.
"Alllll of it! We were grounded for months, suspended for weeks, made to apologize to every person in the school for causing them distress, it was ridiculous!"
Kokoa laughed. The foreigner looked at her crossly before laughing with her. "What about you? You ever done something stupid?"
Kokoa froze, but quickly started walking again with her nose in the air. "Oh please, a vampire elite like me would never make such a stupid mistake like that."
"That's a yes."
"No!" Kokoa turned and pouted at him, a light blush dusting her cheeks. The foreigner looked at her and let out a small chuckle at her expression. He looked towards the ground and shook his head, covering his mouth with a hand.
"Yeah, well-"
*Caw-Caw*
"What was that?" The pair looked up towards the sky and saw a black speck circling above them. No, not circling above, spiraling down towards them. It got closer and closer, faster and faster. It became clear it was some kind of bird attempting to dive bomb them. It flew down in front of them, causing both to flinch when it suddenly stopped mid air just over a foot in front of Kokoa's eyes. Now that it wasn't moving, they could see a white envelope in its beak.
There was an awkward silence as they looked at the bird who was either on very good terms with gravity or had managed to piss it off to the point it not wanting to have anything to do with it, and so was able to be suspended in the air.
"Uhh…, yes?" asked the foreigner.
The bird didn't respond.
The foreigner thought maybe the bird didn't understand him. "Hai?" he asked, trying japanese.
Apparently ravens can roll their eyes. This one chose to exercise this ability before swiftly slapping Kokoa's face and the foreigner's chest with the letter.
As the paper made impact, the world seemed to melt around them. The blue of the sky bled into black and the horizon shrunk and warped until it became a flat wall. A dark mass seemed to take form in front of them.
"Hello there," said the headmaster as his glowing eyes leered at them from behind his desk. "Please, take a seat." He pointed behind the transported teens at the small chairs he had placed in his office. He reached down and pulled a remote out of one of the desk drawers, which he aimed behind himself and pushed a button. A massive television screen flickered to life, displaying a still image of the cafeteria from earlier in the day.
"We are going to be here for awhile." The headmaster pushed play.
-Several Minutes Later-
Kokoa watched as she and the foreigner dove out the windows, moments before the cafeteria doors opened and the headmaster strode in. It had been a disconcerting experience to say the least, watching herself fly off the handle in complete silence like that. The discomfort she felt was not helped by the gaze of the headmaster's glowing eyes as he looked at the two of them as they observed the security camera footage over his shoulder with that chilling smile of his.
The headmaster chose this moment to lift up the remote once more and cut the power to the tv. Kokoa blinked rapidly, her eyes adjusting to the dim candle light being her only vision source as opposed to the bright screen. Once her eyelids stopped fluttering, she turned her attention to the headmaster, only to find him already staring at her. She fought down her impulse to gulp.
The headmaster finally spoke. "Public misconduct, assault with multiple foodstuffs and dinnerware, inciting a food fight, and stealing that foodstuff and dinnerware from several students," he said as though he was reading off of a grocery list. "And that is to say nothing of you fleeing to avoid disciplinary action and skipping half of a school day." The headmaster paused momentarily. Kokoa couldn't help squirming a little in her seat.
"While it was admirable of you to stand up for your classmate, I am afraid that your actions demand some very heavy consequences, not the least of which will be you refunding the students whose food you stole. Do you understand?"
Kokoa clenched her teeth. She glared at the headmaster, looking deep into the glow of his eyes until she was forced to look away. She diverted her gaze to her shoes as she took a deep breath and tightly gripped the bottom of the chair she was sitting on. The teenaged vampire tersely nodded as she pressed deep grooves into the plastic.
The headmaster turned his attention to the foreigner. "Now as for you," he said, switching to english as he addressed the slouching boy. "I must commend you on staying out of the affair entirely, I'm sure that must have been very difficult for you."
Kokoa started in her chair as a wave of intense youkai briefly crashed over her. The headmaster continued as though he hadn't noticed.
"It was very clever of you to convince your friend to remove herself from the premises to avoid capture when you noticed the absence of Ms. Fuzuka, but this obstruction of justice also requires punishment. Do you understand?"
A couple of seconds passed with no response. Kokoa looked up and saw the headmaster looking at the foreigner next to her. There was something off about his usual glowing smile. Kokoa swore that she saw one of the corners of his lips shudder for a nanosecond. She turned to see what caused this break in character, and just saw a normal fifteen-year-old boy glowering at authority. The silence continued for a little bit longer, before it was finally broken by the foreigner.
"What's going to happen to the as- the one who was throwing food at me?" he asked.
"Ah, you are referring to Mr. Ito?" asked the headmaster as he looked down at a file on his desk. "He will be punished appropriately, do not worry about that."
The foreigner looked down and to the side as he forced air out through grit teeth. His fist began to clench.
"Now then," said the headmaster, looking up from his files again. "There is the matter of what form your punishment will take." Kokoa pressed herself into her chair as the headmaster's smile grew even wider. "Fortunately, Mr. Akawa has provided me with an idea."
-In the Cafeteria-
"Aagh!" Kokoa screamed in anger. She had planted her knee down into some curdled salad dressing when she kneeled to scrub a stain off of the floor. "I can't believe I am being required to do such lowly work!" she said as she walked over to one of the soapy water buckets to wash the sauce off.
"Yeah well," said the foreigner as he dumped a bag of trash into one of the big, black, plastic bins they had been provided to place the garbage in. "Look at it this way, we're almost done." He looked around the room and took the progress they had made over the last hour and a half. It was now possible to see through the windows again, the room no longer smelled like a sewer, and the walls had stopped resembling a modern art piece and returned to their usual blank white. Really, all that was left was a bit of mopping and stain removal, along with picking up a few stray scraps of trash.
This did nothing to stop Kokoa's grumbling. "Stupid, menial, useless…" The foreigner had learned to tune her out.
"Oh yeah," he said, suddenly remembering something as he plunged a mop into the soapy bucket. He looked at Kokoa, who was still bent over rubbing her knee raw. "Thanks for helping me out there."
"What?" Kokoa asked, looking up from her washing briefly as her brain processed what was said. "Oh." She looked back down. "Oh please, don't act like it's some big deal. That was the agreement we had made and I honored it. A highborn vampire like myself would never go back on a deal like that." Especially not when the pay is so delicious.
"Yeah, speaking of the deal." The foreigner rolled up his sleeve and presented it to Kokoa. The vampire looked up as the sweet nectar trapped inside was placed within range of her fangs. She quickly licked the inside of her lips. "It's technically after school. Do want to take it now or later?"
Take it take it take it take it, said the primal part of her. No, you idiot! Deal with the hunger for now. Or would you rather go to sleep hungry? Kokoa tore her eyes away from his wrist. "No. No, I'll take it later."
The foreigner nodded, rolled his sleeve back down and got to mopping. A thought suddenly struck Kokoa as she stood up and caught sight of his neck.
"Why didn't you run?" she asked.
"Well," the foreigner said as he coated the floor in soapy water. "I would've felt bad if you had gotten into trouble for protecting me. Which you did anyways, so, you know… Sti-"
"That's not what I meant." Kokoa self-consciously ran her tongue under her fangs. "Last night, when I couldn't stop feeding off you, why didn't you run?"
The foreigner stopped mopping and stood, slack jawed and wide-eyed as he marveled at his own stupidity. He slapped the heel of his palm to his forehead. "Oh, why the fuck didn't I, you could've been a psycho!" Kokoa felt a pang of something in her chest. She decided it was anger.
How dare he even imply that a vampire elite like myself could ever be some kind of psychopath! she thought as the foreigner continued to berate himself. The thought felt forced even to Kokoa. I mean, I stopped once I let go. And I would've been able to stop myself. Eventually.
The foreigner spoke to her once more, snapping her out of her thoughts. "Yeah, you're right." Kokoa had never thought being called right could possibly put a damper on her mood. "Sorry, I'm still not used to running away being my only option now." He went back to mopping.
Kokoa looked down. She tried to think of something to make herself feel better.
Suddenly, Kokoa picked up sounds of someone tearing up the hallway outside. The door burst open and a very angry third-year came storming in. His eyes swept the room before zeroing in on Kokoa. "You!" he screamed. "I missed my date because of you!" He roared at the top of his lungs as he ran towards the redhead, his clothes ripping away from his body as he transformed into an ogre. He threw a punch at her, ready to watch as her torso went flying up into the air. He was left dumbfounded as his fist ceased all movement. It wasn't responding to any new commands his brain sent it either. It refused to budge. Rather, the vampire sadistically smiling as she held the fist in a tight grip refused to let it budge.
"Thank you," the foreigner said over his shoulder. He moved the water bucket out of the way of the angry seventeen-year-old.
The third year tried to yank his hand out of her death grip. He twisted his arm, nothing. He tried pulling on it with his other hand, nada. He tried falling down, pulling on it with all his weight, no result. Finally, he tried taking another swing at her. As soon as his left arm began its forward momentum, Kokoa threw him across the room. She had meant to bury him deep in the wall, but instead,
"Hey!" said the foreigner. "I just cleaned all that!"
Instead the ogre hit one of the trash cans. He tried to scramble to his feet, slipping and sliding around on the trash underneath him as Kokoa slowly approached him.
Get ready to be shown your place, vermin, she thought as she cracked her knuckles. Under my heel. Kokoa summoned Kou, transforming him into a sledgehammer. She swung it like a golf club, using her vampire strength and speed to slam it into the ogre's ribs three times before he flew out of range, and away from all the trash cans.
Now unhindered by the presence of slippery litter, the ogre was able to get to his feet easier. "You bitch!" he roared. "I'm going to kill you!" He rushed at Kokoa, ready to bowl her over, fists already raised into the appropriate position to being punching her once she was on the floor. His plans were foiled when Kokoa, still smiling, slid to the side just before he hit her. She quickly turned Kou into a crowbar and swung it at his knees. The ogre collapsed to the ground and immediately began rolling around, clutching at his dislocated kneecaps.
Kokoa stood over him and grabbed him by the shoulder, forcing him to stand up. She let go of him once he was up, making him endure the pain of putting all his weight onto dislocated knees. She turned Kou into a baseball bat and began winding up. The ogre's eyes went wide and he tried to hobble away, but he couldn't shamble fast enough to escape before Kokoa swung at him.
She hit him so hard he went flying away, going straight towards the trashcans again but looking like he would pass above an open one. Kokoa ran after him, then caught to him in midair, then ran past him to stand next to the trashcan. She lifted the bat over her head. Once the ogre had reached her, she brought it down onto his hips, bending him in half and shoving him into the half-filled trash can. Only the top of his head was sticking out. The ogre looked up through eyes blurred with pain, seeing the upside-down outline of Kokoa as she eclipsed the ceiling lights.
She reached for the lid and held it over his head. "Take this time to enjoy being around your own kind," she said. And with that, she lifted the lid and slammed it down, knocking him out with the hard plastic edge.
Kou, by this time a bat once more, spoke. "This fight lasted for two minutes, fourteen seconds." He flew back into Kokoa's bag.
The foreigner closed the lid on the trashcan he had been refilling. "Thanks for dealing with him again," he said. "And for keeping him away from making any more of a mess."
Kokoa turned to him. "Again with the "thank you"s," she said. "I thought American's were supposed to be rude?"
"My dad's from Norway, I guess the gene's been diluted."
Kokoa rolled her eyes. "If he had knocked anything over, I would've had to clean it up too. And I am not doing that over again!" she said, angry at the very notion.
The foreigner looked at the trashcan she had just stuffed the bastard in. "Still, a seventeen-year-old. That's impressive."
Kokoa scoffed and flipped her hair. "It was nothing! Compared to a Vampire he might as well have been a toddler." Still, she couldn't keep a small smile off of her face. She turned away to keep him from seeing it.
The foreigner looked around the cafeteria. "You know what," he said as he lifted up the mop bucket. "I think this place is about done." He dumped the dirty mop water into the drinking fountain. He turned back to Kokoa. "You wanna go work on the project right now?"
Kokoa was about to say yes, before she caught herself. No, what are you thinking? Have you forgotten already, idiot? You have to go look into those rumors about the werewolf! Kokoa thought, reminding her of what she was supposed to do for newspaper club. "No, I have a thing to do. So-" What are you doing?! Kokoa stopped herself before she could say sorry. She looked down in shock that the idea even crossed her mind.
The foreigner nodded and said, "Okay. So, meet up at the library at seven?"
"Absolutely." Kokoa was surprised at the enthusiasm of her response. Why wouldn't I be enthusiastic! Just thinking about having that blood flowing down my throat again, setting my body on fire, making my hair stand on end, why didn't I take it earlier again?
"Okay, then," said the foreigner. "I'll see you later…" The foreigner paused and concentrated for a second, before turning sheepish. "I just realized, I don't know your name. Mine's Vlad Drakyich." He extended a hand to her. "Nice to meet you, I guess."
Kokoa looked at his hand funny. Who is he, to think he can act that familiar with a vampire? she thought, almost as a reflex. Shut up, he has the blood. That's a good enough reason to be humoring him like this right? Right? Right.
The vampire took Vlad's hand and shook it. "Kokoa Shuzen." She was surprised at how easily her next words came out. "Nice to meet you."
A/N:
When I first wrote this, it was spring of 2015. These four chapters are all I have written. I decided to finally post them up and see the response, and I'm quite happy with it. I'll try and continue the story, but updates will be coming much slower. Thank you for reading and enjoying my story.