Lengths For Love (3 page)

“You... you what?” She seemed to catch the end of my sentence, only. “Ian, are you telling me that...?”

I tried to stop myself, but it was too late. My mouth was doing more talking than my brain was thinking. “I’ll talk to my father and take the semester off. We’ll make sure you get cured and everything, okay? I don’t want you to go to Austria where you don’t know the language or have anyone with you. What if this thing you want isn’t what it seems? You’ll be a lot weaker from chemo and you’ll be around people claiming to drink blood and all. Plus you may get lonely. Not exactly the most comforting thing in the world.”

She started to protest again, but stopped herself. “Well, you do have a point. Just because my parents can’t come doesn’t mean you can’t.” The smile widened on her face. “Okay, Ian! I can go ahead and get you a plane ticket then. I’ll call up the place and tell them you’re coming with me.”

“That’s the spirit!” I exclaimed. In that split second, she looked like the old Alexis. She didn’t look tired or worried, but thrilled that something was going her way. I stroked her hair and her smile faded. “What’s wrong?”

“It’ll all be gone one day.” She said, touching her hair. “I hope you won’t mind.”

Mind? Did she know who she was talking to? “You’ll be beautiful no matter what.”

“You’re lying.” She sighed. “But thank you for saying that anyway.”

I wanted to stay longer, but knew I had a few thing to take care of, first. If I was going to leave for Vienna, I couldn’t do it like that. Hopefully, my sudden decision would not be a bad one. That night, after I had left Alexis’ dorm, I went home and explained the whole situation to my father. He had already known about the cancer, but this was a new level. Here, I was getting involved. And I knew his reaction would not be pleasant. He might have been a small man and didn’t look like he could hold his own, but his voice was booming. If he yelled, the whole neighborhood heard. So I stood against the wall and waited for him to start screaming.

“You want to do what?” my father asked. It was not the scream I had expected. I wasn’t sure if he had heard me the first time around or not. His voice had a mix of disappointment and shock.

“Alexis is going to be alone,” I explained. “You know how her family is. They’re already fretting about how to pay her medical bills and expenses. She’s going to start chemotherapy in a few days and she’s getting ready to go to Vienna.”

My father kept looking at me like I had announced I had come out of the closet. The disappointment had been replaced with confusion. “But why Vienna? Why not here? Your mother didn’t go to Vienna.”

Yeah, well, Mom had no desire to turn into a vampire I wanted to say out loud, but kept it to myself. When my parents had come to this country more than twenty years ago, they had known nothing about it. My father knew a total of three words and my mother only knew a few more. They had worked hard and learned everything with very little help from others. My mother had been the one to teach my father all the way up to her death from AIDS. She was gone before I turned four, so it became my father’s responsibility to raise me. Together, we were teaching other and learning so it turned out to be a good experience.

Yet Alexis was not my mother. My mother would not be vampire crazy in the first place, nor would she run far away to get her treatment. She would also want everyone in her family at her side, not do something crazy without anyone knowing about it. The more I thought about this, the less excited I became.

“Dad, I made a promise to her,” I said. “I’ll just take this semester off and I’ll go back in time for the next to start, okay? I’m pretty far as it is. I just have a few classes left to take before I graduate. But I don’t know how long Alexis has to live. You see how this has affected her.”

“I do, but...”

“Come on, Dad. If it were the other way around, wouldn’t you want someone to be looking after me, too?” I asked.

My father still looked iffy about the whole thing, but I think he knew that he was not going to win. “You promise to go back to school later?”

“Back in the fall of this year. I promise,” I crossed my heart. “By then, Alexis should be more stable.”

“Well... okay,” he gave in. “I cannot say no. You want what you want. But you will come back?”

“We’ll both return and I will go back to school and I will graduate on time,” I swore, giving my father a quick hug. We both hated getting hugs, but he deserved this one. “Thanks a ton, old man. I owe you.”

“Yes, you do.” He peered over his glasses at me. “You come back safe, okay?”

“I will be safe, Dad. And Alexis will be fine and good as new. You won’t even know that she had cancer!”

He chuckled and patted me on the back. “Go pack. You have a long journey.”

I said good night and went upstairs to do so. It felt surreal. I was doing this. I was going with my girlfriend to Austria just so she could be satisfied. It was nuts and wrong, but I had made my promise. If this was what she wanted, this was what she would get.

As I started to pack, I kept thinking about how much I wish she had another request. I didn’t want her to be disappointed, but I had a feeling she was being set up by this. Anything else would have been better. Another dream. Anything besides this. I was willing to splurge for a new car or a cruise or a pony. Those were things I could give. Those were promises I could keep.

Those were the things and promises I could understand.

Once I had taken care of everything at school and my ticket was purchased, we headed off to our new destination. My father made me promise to call him and I agreed before saying goodbye. Then it was time to board and we were off, Alexis being more excited than I was. She assured me for the twelfth time that everything was taken care of. She knew what she was doing and she wanted me to stay out of it. I hoped she was right.

Flying to Vienna was very uneventful. We went through our security checks and were ready with everything when it came to disembarking in Austria. Alexis needed to be wheeled around, but that was no problem. She didn’t mind being pushed in a chair. It beat walking around the terminals, after all. Our first stop was in New York City and from there we would fly straight to Vienna. I liked how straightforward our flight was. I knew Alexis would not enjoy being stuck in many places, so that was a relief. She was already impatient.

It was what came after that would be the problem. From the airport, we had to go to the train station. From there, we would get to the little area that we needed to be in. It was just a little past everything in Vienna, far from the city itself. I wasn’t sure why it said it was in Vienna if it wasn’t actually there. But it didn’t matter. Alexis was going to get her wish at last. She was going to see “real” vampires. The entire idea made me laugh. I held it in, though I let out a snort now and then.

The train was small, but there were far too many people or vampires or whatever the heck they were calling themselves. I could not believe that I was going to be stuck with them the whole way to our destination. All the places in the world and Alexis wanted to get treatment in Austria. I had never seen so many gloomy looking faces in one room. Any smile that I caught was always small and forced. It was like they knew they were headed to a slaughterhouse or prison. But that was impossible because we weren’t going there. We were going to the Vamporium. The real name of the place was The Augustin Mansion, but everyone called it the Vamporium. I still loathed the name, but if they enjoyed it, so be it.

Alexis was sitting in a car where those who needed special attention were to be. She boarded first and told me that she would be fine. I had asked to sit with her, but they told me I had to leave because the car she was in was packed with patients. She promised to be fine as long as someone was looking after her. From how packed the car was, I figured she was right. So I gave her a kiss before finding my own place, not too far from where she was.

Most of the front car was full so I found myself sitting next to a blonde girl wearing tons of black eyeliner and dressed like she was Elvira’s little sister. Everything on her, save for her hair and skin, was black. Her lips and nails were painted black and there didn’t seem to be any color on her, but her eyes. They were pale and blue from what I could tell. If she had loosened up on the raccoon look and the Goth attire, I would find her pretty. She was so sullen and sunken in that I wasn’t sure she was alive. It was her breathing that caught me off guard.

“Hi.” She looked up finally, but said nothing. There was no smile on those painted lips either. “I hope this seat wasn’t taken.”

“No.” Her voice was empty and lifeless. Geez. Couldn’t she at least look at me and acknowledge that I was there?

“I’m Ian.” I held out my hand for her to shake. She looked down at it and then back down at the ground. I tried not to take insult to it and kept talking. “So... headed to the Vamporium?”

“Yeah.” She replied. Again, no introduction and no looking at me. What had I done wrong? Did I have a piece of spinach on my teeth? Was my breath bad? What was it that kept her from looking at me or even telling me more than she did? I couldn’t be ugly. Looking around quickly, I saw I wasn’t the only Asian here. It couldn’t have been the way I looked and I wasn’t being off-putting so it wasn’t my personality. Why on earth was she ignoring me?

“So, um... first time traveling?” I was desperate to get some conversation going. I didn’t know how long we were going to be on the train so I had to find a way to entertain myself. She only stared out the window as the train started to roll. Oh brother. I had to stop now or she was probably going to drink my blood. Provided real vampires did that, of course. According to Alexis, this happened. I had never witnessed such a thing, but I didn’t want to test the theory now.

A guy in a dark blue suit with a light blue tie ran up to us and stopped in front of our row. He looked about my age with dark brown hair, a strong jaw, and lips fuller than Alexis had. They were girl lips and I tried not to laugh at them. His hazel eyes locked on the blonde girl. “Jenny, you don’t belong here. You’re supposed to be up there.”

The blonde vampire finally looked up. “But Vince...”

“This is where the humans are, Jenny. Vampires over there.” He pointed to the front. Jenny grumbled something, picked up her bag, and left my aisle. Her purse almost smacked my face and she glowered at the other guy. He snapped his fingers and pointed to where she needed to be. “We’ll talk about this later. Now get going.”

“Um...” I started once Jenny was gone. “You didn’t...”

“You don’t have to thank me. This is just my job. I have to make sure everyone is where they should be.” Vince sat down next to me and held out his hand. I noticed the pinkie ring on this hand with the initials V.A. “Vincent Augustin. My father is the one in charge of the Vamporium. Well, that’s what the vampires call it and we’re pretty amused by it. The nickname just stuck.”

“Ian Choi. Pleased to meet you.”

I shook his hand and felt his ring almost cut me. I got a better look at him now while his hand was cutting off the circulation to the rest of my body. He seemed shorter than me for one and had sharper facial features. Dark hair, hazel eyes, those soft pink lips, cheekbones that one could cut deli meat from, and pale skin with a few pimples here and there. All the same, the pimples weren’t enough to make him ugly. The acne scars could probably go away with some good cream. In short, he was the kind of man I hated. He was everything I could not be and then some. Had he already met Alexis? If so, I was screwed. She would fall for this guy and how clean he looked on the spot. His acne scars would be nothing to her.

“So, what brings you to Austria?”

“My girlfriend,” I admitted. “She has a thing for vampires.”

“Oh, I see,” he nodded. “So you want to be turned or something?”

“Huh? Oh no!” I shook my head. I had no desire of becoming a blood sucker if that’s what he wanted to know. “She just wants to meet a vampire before she dies.”

“Meet a vampire?”

I blushed. “Okay, she wants to be turned, too. But she has better reasons than wanting to stay young forever or drinking blood. She’s dying of leukemia so I figured I’d fulfill any wish she had. Keep her entertained for a while.”

“Entertained?” The smile disappeared. “You really don’t know what the Vamporium is, do you?”

“Isn’t it where you find ‘vampires’?”

“Well, yeah but... it’s a little more than that.”

“What do you mean by a little more?” Now, I was curious. According to Alexis, the Vamporium was a vampire hangout. What more could it be?

“It’s almost a haven for them.”

“Almost a haven?” This was getting weirder by the minute. Why did Alexis ask for this? I was more willing to give her a car or a trip to Hawaii. A vampire to turn her immortal? Definitely more difficult. I wasn’t even sure if any of these so-called vampires were the real deal. To me it looked like a bunch of kids trying to be cool by being Goths or something. And if this was almost haven, then it seemed like we were going to a place we didn’t need to be.

“There are dangerous things at the Vamporium,” Vincent explained, lowering his voice. “Things that you shouldn’t ever try to get involved in. You won’t just lose your life if you knew what happened behind the scenes. They’d take your soul away.”

I swallowed. “Who’s they?”

“Can’t tell you that, either. It’s a little deeper than you probably want to know.” He sank down in his chair and got comfortable, taking off his shoes. I just stared at him, wanting more. Alexis had to be right and he was wrong. There was no way she would gush about the Vamporium if it was so bad. I felt like this was an equation with something missing from it.

“But it’s nice of you,” he said.

I turned back to him and the train started to speed up. “Excuse me?”

“About your girlfriend. It’s nice of you to do this for her.”

“Oh.” I looked out the window and tried to hide my discomfort. “Thank you.”

The majority of our ride was in silence. He often would ask questions about me, though never offered anything about himself. My mind was too focused on Alexis. I went to the front a few times to check on her. So far, everything was fine. She slept through most of the trip and the others up front told me that she had been fine. It was a relief, but I still wished I had been sitting with her instead.