Until Midnight

In Death, Does A Soul Stay?

Chapter One

8:00 AM, Monday, November 15th, 2014

I didn't sleep the night before. Even if I could've slept, I wouldn't anyway. The fact was that there was just too much on my mind. Too much for a sixteen year old girl who lived in Laygen, Colorado. Being bitten by a vampire really puts a damper on sleep, I guess. 

I was slightly angry too. I didn't ask for this. Yet again, nobody probably asks to become a vampire willingly. It's not like people formed lines at the local blood bank (where, unsurprisingly, many vampires skulked around at night) and held signs saying "Bite me!" or "My blood's certified fresh!"

I was just unlucky. At the wrong place at the wrong time. I guess I can conclude that I'm angry at myself more than anything. I shouldn't have done what I did. It happened last night, before the moon even reached it's apex. My parents were asleep (working at Laygen's Financial Center for Monetary Extraction would make me want to sleep too) and my younger brother Darius was upstairs lost in the world of some new video game. 

My family, the Stratas, kept a police scanner in our pantry, so if anything odd would float to the surface, we'd check it out, excluding Darius, for he was too young for this kind of work. And by "work" I mean vampire slaying. Yeah. Woo-hoo, that's my big family secret: were vampire slayers. I joined the family business, if that's what you would call it, at the age of fourteen. Darius is ten, and still has a long way to go before he upholds the title of Buffy. 

Anyway, I had been doing the dishes silently when I heard the crackle and beep of the scanner, emanating from the pantry. I opened the door quietly, so to not awaken my parents, and listened in. A gruff, years-of-experience voice emitted from the scanner. "202, 3, we have a possible robbery interception on Moland Drive, a truck transporting blood to the hospital, please respond back."

Right then I knew that vampires were involved, for what would a human robber want with blood? Sell it on eBay to cannibals? I didn't friggin' think so. And here's the part that I hate myself for. I didn't wake up my parents. I didn't say anything, for that matter. I thought Hey, I've been doing this since I was fourteen. I can handle this one on my own, right? Oh how wrong I was. 

I quickly went to the cupboard under the stairs to retrieve some of my family's "arsenal". The "arsenal" itself included stakes (duh), blessed water, and a few crossbows. Yeah, and before you go all original on me, let me just say that crosses and garlic don't work. They just give a vampire a nasty hangover, and then a hissy fit. 

I grabbed two stakes, a small decanter of blessed water, and went on my merry way, careful not to alert my brother, who, as I said before, was awake. 

Once outside of my two story home on Brick Road, I immediately began the short trek to Moland Drive, which wasn't far. Under different circumstances, if I wasn't a vampire slayer, I would be scared by the desolate, far-away feel of Laygen, my home town, at night. The woods was home to shadows and sounds, and the sky was so star-lit sometimes that it looked otherworldly. 

But being that I kill supernatural beings for a living, the night didn't house any terrors for me, at least, not anymore. Before I took on hunting the bloodthirsty undead, the night spooked the hell out me. Nightmares of soul-stealing demons and a creepy van lurking around the corner used to plague my dreams, but after being exposed to the real world and what evil things stalked it's vast corners, my fear of the night began to ebb as fast as river water did on it's path. Now the only nightmares I had were failing Geometry, which, by the way, is an evil subject. I wouldn't be surprised if a vampire created it. 

Anyway, by the time I reached Moland Drive, a cop car was already there. Then my heart jumped in my throat when I saw it's sirens dead, the driver's side door open, and a uniformed body lying still as a leaf on water by the opened door.