Chapter 18
18
Ashley
E verything was exactly as Ashley remembered and also fit like a sweater that shrank two sizes in the wash. The black, empty cornfields passed by the window of the rental car as she drove, navigating by muscle memory. If someone had asked her how to get from the airport to her parents’ house, she would have had no way of telling them. Twelve years had flown by, but the second she got into the car and Esther buckled in next to her, she pulled out of the parking lot, turned a confident left, and kept driving.
They drove in silence, Esther keeping to herself and Ashley fiddling with the radio, which never kept a station out on the country roads. It hadn’t snowed yet, or at least not enough to stick, so driving wasn’t difficult. The dark and barren fields kept bringing her back to her first few years post-transformation when she was all on her own and scared of her own shadow. She couldn’t help hitting the accelerator to hurry their trip along.
“Did you want a break?” Esther asked after an hour of driving. “I could take a turn.”
“No, we’re almost there.” Ashley kept her eyes glued to the road, the headlights giving her tunnel vision.
“Ashley.” Esther’s voice was cautious, as though she sensed something was wrong.
But nothing was wrong. She was just driving. They would be there any minute. Just a few more miles to go.
“Ashley, can you pull over?”
“No.” The last thing Ashley wanted to do was stop out here in the middle of nowhere.
“Ashl—”
“I said no!” she yelled and cringed at how her voice took up the whole car.
She was fine. She was fine. She was fine .
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong!” Ashley didn’t know how to stop yelling.
“Sorry, that was the wrong question.” Esther kept her voice low.
The road blurred in front of her as her eyes watered. She was being managed. Esther thought she was out of control. And maybe she was, but she couldn’t stop the car. Not here. Not in this infinite black.
“What I meant was, what are you thinking about?”
Ashley wiped her eyes on her sleeve, clearing her vision again. “I’m thinking I’m a terrible travel companion.”
“Hush.”
Ashley snuck glances at her but kept her eyes mostly to the road.
“Going home is hard,” Esther continued, “and most people aren’t vampires on top of it.”
“It’s not going home,” said Ashley. “Well, it is going home. But right now, it’s the nothing on the way there.”
“The nothing?”
As counterintuitive as it seemed, discussing her lonely years took away the sting of seeing the darkness creep up around her, so she kept going. “When I changed, I wasn’t exactly alone. Not at first at least.”
She paused, not sure how much of this story to tell. But Esther wasn’t her girlfriend. Not for real. She wasn’t even gay. There was no reason to try to impress her or keep parts hidden.
“In the beginning, there was Konstantine.” Ashley blushed, hearing the reverent way she still said her name. “She was my first crush in high school. Not that anything ever happened. I wasn’t out then. It was the early 2000s in rural Iowa. No one was out.” She was rambling and glanced at Esther to see if she was still listening. “Anyway, I went to college after high school, like the good middle-class daughter I was. But while I was gone, my Oma died, and she was kind of an important person.”
But she couldn’t go through all of that now. How her Oma was the one she made cookies with after school and taught her to curse in German when she was angry so she wouldn’t upset her teacher. She showed Ashley how to cross-stitch and to speak louder, and going home would never be the same without her there.
“I came home for the funeral and wasn’t all right. And it’s a small town so, of course, Konstantine was there. We got to talking, and one thing led to another. In one weekend, I lost a grandma and gained a girlfriend and also agreed to become a vampire. Turns out Konstantine changed sometime during college out east.” She paused to take a breath, stealing a glance at Esther to see she was still listening. “Oma had this thing she would say, Einmal ist keinmal . Once is nothing. And I just thought, if I only have one life, I’ll make the most of it. I’m probably butchering the German. I never did learn much more than cursing.”
“So, did you live with her after that?”
“Yeah, I lived with Konstantine. Dropped out of school and started training to be a functional vampire. The first few days are the hardest, so it was nice to have someone to walk me through the process. Some things at least. I still have trouble stopping, once I start drinking.”
“Where is she now?” Esther with the hard questions.
Ashley gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. “She’s dead.”
“Wait, I thought vampires couldn’t die. Don’t you live forever?”
“Well, there are some pretty classic ways to kill a vampire, but strangely enough, it wasn’t burning or a stake to the heart. It was witches.” Ashley took a deep breath and tried to focus on the road as that day came tumbling back to her. How she had come home from the farmer’s market, so proud to have been in a crowd, and bore the fresh produce to prove her success. But the house was empty except for a clawing, fizzing sensation in her throat she would later recognize as residual magic.
“Witches?”
“I waited a couple of weeks before realizing she wasn’t coming back, but her absence activated my anxiety, and I relapsed. I couldn’t control the bloodlust like I had before. I decided to take myself away from temptation.” The town lights grew on the horizon, and Ashley felt both relief to get out of the endless darkness and anxiety at the idea of being around people that knew her again. “I ran away, wandering cornfields for a time as I made my way over to western Nebraska to get away from the crowds.”
“You walked to Nebraska?”
“Some. I hitchhiked a lot of it. It wasn’t the safest option, so I tried not to do it often.” Ashley didn’t mention that it wasn’t safe for the person giving her the ride, not herself.
That was her vigilante phase. She tried to live on deer blood, but if she got an especially handsy driver, she’d dispense of him as a service to humanity. It never settled quite right though, no matter how terrible the driver.
Esther was the first human she drank straight from in years.
The road curved through town and out again, and Esther left her in silent reflection for the rest of the drive. Her parents still lived in their country home just on the other side of town. She recognized the colorful lights over the porch and on the large pine in the front yard.
They pulled into the gravel drive, and Ashley turned off the engine. “We’re here.”