So I'm a Vampire... Now What? - Book 2 (Original Version)

Chapter 1.5: The Other Vampire pt5

My cousin Imelda was asleep in what used to be my room, and she looked like she had been sick for a very long time. I could see the bite marks covering her arms and neck, dark bruises around each of them as if they had healed poorly or had simply been reopened many, many times. Seeing those bruises was concerning. From my own experience, I knew that there was an enzyme in vampire saliva that helped to speed up clotting and healing, to the point that by a day after an encounter, it was like the wound had never been there. The scars covering Imelda's arms and neck looked like they had never been allowed to heal. It looked like someone had been snacking on her, over and over, feasting on her blood... because that was precisely what had happened.

My fingers curled into fists as I stood there and looked at her, and I felt that familiar impotent rage of wanting to do something but knowing that I was too late to be of any use.

"The whole family knows what's been going on," Ronnie said. "It was the mirrors that tipped us off, you know."

"The mirrors?" I asked, and realized just how dry my throat was. I coughed and looked at Claude to see if he knew what Ronnie was talking about. He shook his head and looked back to Imelda.

"The mirrors downstairs. That motherfucker thought he was so clever, tricking us into not seeing him, but we could always see him in the mirrors. Your mama was the one who figured it out a couple of months ago. Up to that point, she thought she was being haunted. We all thought it too, cuz every time anybody came over it was like there was always this feeling like someone else was in the room with us, but we could never see anybody. So we thought it was some vengeful spirit. It didn't help that he's always moving stuff and opening doors. He must have been laughing his ass off."

"How long has Imelda been like this?"

"Couple months maybe. It's only gotten bad in the past couple of weeks, but Imelda was sick on and off for a while. We thought she was anemic or some shit, but the doctors couldn't find anything wrong with her. She was perfectly healthy, they said, but we could see that she wasn't. When the bruises started showing up we all thought she'd gone back with that shitty boyfriend of hers—"

"Eric? I think I saw pictures of them on Facebook."

"Yeah, Eric. He'd gotten rough with her a couple times, but you know Imelda: she gave him bruises to match her own. Those two were like fire and gasolina, you know? El fuego conflagración."

"Boom," I echoed.

"Exactly," Ronnie smiled. "A lotta, lotta boom."

"But it wasn't Eric," Claude said, and Ronnie shook her head.

"Nope," she said. "Instead it was a motherfucking vampire. I would have taken a ghost any day. At least ghosts don't go around sucking your blood. They just knock over a couple of cups and stuff. Now I'm beginning to think that it's been vampires all along just fucking with people's heads."

I resisted the urge to jump to the defence and thought it to myself instead: #NotAllVampires. Goddamn Daemien.

"How was anybody to know? It's not like vampires are supposed to even exist, right?"

Claude just gave me a look, and I shrugged it off angrily.

"Didn't anybody think it was strange that Auntie Rosita was taking down all of the crucifixes and statues in the house?" Claude asked.

"She said it was because she was going to be painting and redecorating," Ronnie said. "You can see how far that got, but then again, Imelda was getting pretty sick right about then, weak all the time."

I could imagine it, Daemien walking into the room night after night and almost tenderly biting into her wrist or shoulder and letting the blood flow. Imelda wouldn't have been able to resist and would have just watched him, entranced, entirely under his spell, somehow convincing herself that it was what she wanted.