Compulsion [J. Murphy]

C H A P T E R T H R E E

I was falling asleep when Murphy woke up coughing and cluthing his throat. He looks towards the dead human on the ground, he must be smelling the blood.

I get up and kneel beside him. "Are you okay?"

"What's going on?" He asks with a terrified look in his eyes. It's not pointed at me though.

"There's something that I need to tell you," I grab him by the arm so that he'll look at me.

He keeps glancing back at the dead person like they're going to wake up. "What?"

"I'm a vampire," I start off bluntly.

"And I'm a ghost," he says sarcastically.

I bare my fangs at him, making him jump back away from me. Now he's looking at me with that fearful look that I've gotten so much. "No, actually you're in transition. An arrow hit you in the chest earlier when we were by the window, but I used to compulsion to make you forget. Now, you're wondering why there is no wound there. It's because I healed it using my blood, us vampires' can do that. Because you had my blood in your system, when the next arrow hit you in the throat, you went into transition."

"Why?" He asks. I guess that was too many words.

"When a human dies with vampire blood in their system, they start to transition into a vampire."

He clenches his jaw, "so what? I'm a vampire now, just like that?"

"No, in order to complete the transition, you need to drink human blood," I pause. "I decided to give you a choice. If you don't decide to drink the blood, you'll die. If you do, then you become a vampire. See that dead person over there? One drop of blood will be enough to turn you."

"Tell me everything about being a vampire."

I nod. "You get super speed and hearing, and also super strength. Plus, you get to live for as long as you are not killed. The bad thing, though, is that you have to drink blood for as long as you live. You can survive off of animal blood, you can compel a human to let you drink from them, or you could kill a human. Back before radiation wiped out all of the species, mostly, we could steal blood bags from hospitals," I say trailing off slightly at the end.

"Wait, first of all, what kills a vampire? Second, how old are you?"

"There's actually not a lot that can kill us. A wooden stake, or sharp piece of wood, to the heart. If you get completely caught on fire, then you die. Also, if you get your heart ripped out, but I doubt there's any vampires around except for me. And in your case right now, sunlight could kill you. But I have a solution for that," I take a deep breath. What I'm about to tell him is something that I never even told my brothers. "I am part witch, except I have a specific lable for what I am. Heretic. I can syphon magic from something in order to use it for a spell."

"You never answered the question of how old you are," he mumbles quietly.

I scoff, "don't you know that you should never ask a girl how old she is?"