Chapter 15
Eight Weeks Ago
Late the next morning, Madame Dupuy poked her head into my darkened room and told me it was time to get up.
She raised the blinds and opened the windows.
I rolled away from the bright sunshine, covering my eyes.
The warm breeze felt nice, though, and I could hear the shouts of kids playing outside, a chain of warmth and sound that anchored me.
Madame Dupuy reached down and felt my forehead and cheeks with the back of her hand, then smiled at me.
“Still no fever,” she said. “That is a good sign.” She left and returned in a few minutes with a melon smoothie.
Perfect pearls of condensation beaded the glass, and a tiny sprig of mint made a beautiful green X on the pale orange drink.
I wondered if she Instagrammed everything she cooked for us.
Maybe in her secret life she was a food influencer, posting photos of gorgeous dishes to make her millions of followers drool.
I was definitely drooling—I was so hungry, and the smoothie looked delicious.
I took a sip, anticipating the fragrance of ripe melon and the floral sweetness of honey.
It tasted every bit as fabulous as a glass of pulped cardboard.
And it sent knives of pain down my throat.
I grimaced and set the glass on my nightstand.
She shook her head. “That is not enough. Drink some more.”
I reached for my whiteboard and wrote that it hurt to swallow.
“I am sorry; you must drink it so you can recover.”
I shrugged and wrote that I couldn’t taste anything, either. She gave me a look, so I had another sip, wincing as it went down.
“I am sorry about Monsieur Nick and your other friends.”
None of this is their fault.
She nodded. “I know.”
It made me feel a little less lonely to know that she understood.
I drank some more smoothie, sad that I couldn’t taste anything and that it hurt this much to do something so basic and necessary as eat.
When I’d finished, she changed my dressing, working carefully to loosen the tape, trying not to put pressure on my neck.
Even her light touch, though, sent spikes of pain all the way to my toes.
She tried to distract me by telling me about her trip to the market that morning, what she’d bought, how many tourists she’d seen blocking shoppers as they photographed themselves in front of the vendors’ stands. Then she gasped.
“Where is the necklace I gave you?”
It took me a minute to remember. My life before Le Bec’s attack seemed to belong to another person.
I’m so sorry, I scribbled. I accidentally broke the chain. I was going to get it fixed, but then all this happened.
She went white. The pendant is fine, I wrote, worried that she’d think I’d been careless with her family heirloom. It’s just the chain that broke, and I’ll get it fixed or replace it. I’m sorry, I added, because she looked devastated.
“When?” she breathed. “When did you break it?”
Last week.
“Before you were attacked?” Her voice was tight and urgent.
Yes; before.
She looked like she would cry. “It was supposed to keep you safe from them. Did you—Did he—” She closed her eyes and focused inward, like she was sifting her brain for the right words. She took in a breath, let it out slowly, and looked hard at me. “Did you ever invite him in?”
Like into the apartment?
“Anywhere. Did you ever say to him, ‘Enter,’ or ‘I invite you,’ or was there a threshold you told him he could step across?”
No.
She nodded, then turned abruptly and went into my bathroom, returning with my makeup mirror, which she thrust at me. “What do you see?”
I saw a white face surrounded by a rats’ nest of unwashed hair. A partially untaped lump of gauze covered my neck from below my jaw to just above my clavicle.
I waved my hand in a circular motion in front of my face, then pointed to the dressing on my neck to tell her I was seeing my face and neck.
I looked so wrecked and weak that I wanted to cry.
Le Bec had done that to me. She craned around the mirror, and when our eyes met in its reflection, her distraught expression relaxed into a small, cautious smile.
I pushed the mirror away. Why had she wanted me to look at myself like this—wounded and vulnerable?
She nodded as though she’d read my thoughts. “Je sais; I know,” she soothed. “I did not do it to hurt you; I needed to see if the mirror reflected your face.”
Why wouldn’t it? I wrote.
“It would not if you were a vampire.” She said it matter-of-factly.
What?
“I gave you that necklace to keep you safe because silver repels vampires. It burns them if they touch it.”
I was about to scoff, but then I remembered in the catas, when Le Bec had “pretended” to bite me, he’d recoiled as soon as he put his mouth onto my neck.
Like he’d been hurt. The night he’d attacked me, he’d taunted me about not being protected by my necklace.
I remembered because it had been such an odd thing to say.
You can’t be telling me that he’s a real vampire?
That vampires actually exist? I felt distant from myself, like part of me was floating nearby, connected but only barely.
It did kind of explain why everyone was using that word instead of something normal, like “attacker” or “predator,” though.
And Le Bec had torn my neck open with his teeth, like every vampire I’d ever heard about.
She sighed as she sat down on the side of my bed.
“My grandparents were vampire hunters,” she murmured.
“Whenever there was a vampire nearby, they were called. They would stalk, stake, and kill it. They taught my mother, and she taught me. I knew that silver, salt, and garlic repel vampires before I knew how to read. When I was nine, I learned how to kill one.”
You were nine? She nodded. I imagined her as a little kid, going off to school, learning about fractions, playing with her friends, and then coming home and getting vampire-killing lessons. How is that not child abuse?
She did a sideways nod, like, I’m not disagreeing. “I left my family as soon as I was able to.”
How do vampires happen? Are they born that way? Is it some sort of genetic thing?
“They are made. Vampirism is a disease that lives in the blood. One is infected by the bite of the vampire.”
I went cold. Le Bec bit me. And you think Le Bec is a vampire. She nodded. So that makes me one. My hand shook as I wrote the words.
She was saying “no” before I’d finished writing. “I cannot see how you could remain infected after a blood transfusion.”
I had a transfusion?
She put her hand over mine. “You had lost so much blood.”
So I won’t become a vampire. I held her gaze.
“I think not.”
The skin on the back of my neck prickled. But you’re not sure.
She took me by the shoulders and stared into my eyes. I felt like she could see my secrets. “You will not. That is all. You did not invite him in. You have new blood. It must protect you.”
Why is not inviting him in so important? The transfusion made sense because replacement blood, but it seemed weird that vampires would require hospitality before they could attack someone.
“I do not know.” She shrugged. “I was a child when I learned these things. No one explained the why—perhaps they did not know themselves.”
What if I do become a vampire, though? An infection might survive a transfusion.
She shook her head. “You will not.” Her voice was kind, but it was still a command. Then, so softly I wasn’t sure I’d heard right, she murmured, “I cannot kill another one.”
After she left, I stared at nothing for a long time, worrying.
What if I was a vampire, though? I tried to reassure myself.
She thought the transfusion had scoured out any possible vampire infection.
I’d also seen my reflection in the mirror.
Everyone knew vampires didn’t have reflections.
So I must be fine, I reasoned. And I didn’t feel different.
Inconvenient questions kept popping into my head.
Why would a transfusion get rid of the infection?
They didn’t pump out all my blood and replace it; they just topped me off, like a gas tank on empty.
The infection could still be there. Would it be diluted?
Would I then be only sort of a vampire—and what did sort of a vampire look like?
Were some people more resistant to the infection?
Questions sleeted through my mind faster than I could process them.
I found a notebook and scribbled keywords until my brain calmed down enough to group them into categories.
Then I looked at the categories and tried to figure out the main question of each one.
I narrowed my list to my three most important questions: How long does it take after a bite for the infection to become noticeable, what are the symptoms of vampire disease, and is there a cure?
Then I dived into Google. No matter how I fine-tuned the search parameters, though, the majority of hits were for fanfic, RPGs and cosplay, and video games.
The few medical references I found basically said to see a therapist if you thought you were a vampire, because your brain was broken.
So the internet, at least, didn’t believe vampires existed.
“Good morning.” Dad came into my room and sat down on my bed. “How are you feeling?” I scooted over to make room, sliding my vampire research notebook under my pillows. Sore, I wrote.
He nodded. “You really gave us a scare.”
I’m sorry.
He sighed. “You’ve always been a responsible kid, and so maybe I was too lax with you.
I let things go because I trusted you to use good judgment.
I can understand in a strange country, in a new culture, how it could affect your thinking—how you could trust the wrong people and end up putting yourself in danger. ”