The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (31 page)

I felt the needle slide into my neck, and managed to get halfway off the couch before slumping down against the cushions, still aware, but with my limbs numb and useless.

“I can only assume vampires use some sort of paralytic venom,” Mr. Levitt said, stepping around the couch and gently placing a hypodermic needle on the coffee table. I wondered what he’d injected me with—I was paralyzed, but not numb. Clearly he had better serial killer pharmaceutical mojo than I did. “I mean, I can’t be sure, having never seen one work, but it seems likely. Draining all the blood out of somebody must take a while, right? I wish I’d seen how they feed. I don’t know if it’s messy or neat, though I suspect the popular image of two tiny puncture holes in the neck is less accurate than tearing out the throat and feeding from the artery.”

I tried to say something—
Why are you doing this
, maybe—but could only manage a sort of grunted croak.

He seemed to understand anyway. “Remember when we chatted at the Fall Formal? How I, well, you know, suggested murdering you? The more I thought about it, the better that idea sounded. Not so much because you’re a threat to me—any more than a newborn lion cub is an immediate threat to the patriarch of the pride—but you’re something of a loose end, aren’t you? I certainly
hinted
to you about the kind of person I am, which wasn’t too smart, but you know our kind, you and I, sometimes we can’t resist the urge to boast. And now seems like the perfect time to get rid of you. Your father’s out of town. Your vampire boyfriend isn’t keeping an eye on you anymore. So when you
are
found in a terrible state, here, well, certain people in the know will assume you were killed
by
a vampire, possibly even your departed boyfriend. Why, we may even need to bring your father into the Interfaith League of Vampire Slayers—I know, a silly name, but it makes them feel better, having an
organization
. He’d be a great addition, now that I think about it, and with the death of his daughter as a motive to drive him, oh, he’d become a scourge of the undead.”

I gurgled.

He nodded. “I’d be upset, too,” he said. “But this is what I do, and this is where we are, and this is how it’s going to be.” He grabbed me by my feet and yanked me off the couch, and I thudded to the floor, banging my head painfully on the hard wood. Not hard enough to knock me out, unfortunately. I could have done without consciously experiencing what came next. Mr. Levitt unfolded a knife bag like chefs use on those cooking reality shows and drew out a shining blade. “Messy, I think, around the throat,” he said, and I tried to scream, but I couldn’t, not even when what he was doing started to hurt.

I don’t remember much of what happened after I blacked out from the pain, but here’s what I can reconstruct, based on what I heard later:

Joachim had been lurking around my house. When I asked him why later, he got very sheepish and said having found one vampire in the woods made him worried there might be others lurking with a grudge against me, so he was out sniffing around in the general vicinity of my house, sort of on guard-bear duty. Personally, I think he was trying to work up the nerve to come in and try to seduce me—doubtless in an endearingly puppy-doggish way—but who knows? He says he smelled humans in the vicinity, but didn’t smell any vampires, so he didn’t worry about it, having no reason to expect humans to mean me any harm. He didn’t pay any particular attention to the human’s scent, either, which was good for me, as it turned out. Otherwise he would have torn Mr. Levitt apart, I’m sure, which would have been a shame.

Anyway, he got a sudden whiff of blood, he says, and worried about me, so he rushed the door. Being still in human form, and thus possessed of no particularly superhuman strength, he settled for pounding wildly on the locked front door. The noise was enough to startle “the killer” as Joachim called him. I objected, at first, but he pointed out that I
had
been killed, so it was an accurate descriptor. Hard to argue with that.

Mr. Levitt took off out the back, and Joachim finally decided to try the back door, but in such a way that their paths never crossed. Joachim rushed into the living room and found me on the floor, bleeding grievously all over the hardwood, breathing but just barely, with blood bubbling up out of my mouth. He held me in his arms and cradled me and, I imagine, wept manly tears of manly sadness, though he’s never told me so.

Then
things got interesting, and I wish I’d been there to see it: Edwin arrived. He burst through the back door, raced into the living room like a man made of lightning, knocked Joachim aside, and then bent over me. Joachim, in the presence of a wendigo, began to transform into his bear form, but before the transformation took hold completely, he growled, “Save her!” And then fled into the woods, I guess in case his basic vampire-killing instincts got the better of him.

So my beloved Edwin gazed into my eyes, and knelt before me, and knew I was going to die, and that he was my only hope for any kind of survival, and he bowed his head to my ruined throat, and pressed his lips against my wound, and let my blood flow into him as his essence (or venom, or virus, or whatever it is) flowed back into
me
.

And that, dear reader, is how I became a vampire.

I have
some
memory of the transition—the way you remember fever dreams. Edwin took me to his family’s home, and put me down in his own room, where I sweated and writhed and howled and clawed at the air for nearly twenty-four hours. Argyle was on hand—the whole family came back when they realized Edwin was gone—but he couldn’t do much for me, at that point. They weren’t sure if I would make it, but on Sunday morning, I opened my eyes, and licked my lips, and croaked the word “Hungry.”

Edwin fed me pig’s blood, by hand, from a turkey baster, until I had the strength to sit up in bed on my own on Sunday afternoon.

Meanwhile, Joachim cleaned up the blood—he did a good job; Harry came back from the conference and didn’t notice anything amiss. Good thing Levitt hadn’t stabbed me on the couch. Getting blood out of cushions is hell. Joachim also did a sort of half-assed investigative job to find out who’d tried to kill me, but Mr. Levitt hadn’t exactly left much in the way of evidence, and Joachim didn’t know what he was looking for anyway. He didn’t come to visit me during my convalescence, and who can blame him? Dropping a were-bear in a nest of vampires is a dangerous idea. All the Scullens and the Scales stopped in to check on me, except for Rosemarie. Shockingly, she wasn’t thrilled at my transition to her kind, thinking she’d be stuck with me forever, now.

Boy, was she wrong.

“Edwin,” I croaked, once I’d finished slurping down a bellyful of blood (which tasted like savory miso soup, more than anything else—hot, salty, delicious). “How? You were gone, you left me, why…?”

“I never stopped watching you,” he murmured, touching my face gently. “Through the eyes of others. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry, and I really meant to make a clean break, but I knew how my heart was breaking, and if you were anything like me, I was afraid you might suffer, hurt yourself, or just allow yourself to be hurt by negligence. I was… both relieved, and perhaps a little stung, when you seemed to move on so quickly.”

I laughed, but it was a rasping thing. “I was just trying to distract myself, Edwin. You left a hole in me when you left, and I did my best to fill it however I could.”

“When I realized you were spending so much time with Joachim, I was… conflicted. Glad you had such a formidable protector with you, but jealous, too, of course, of your growing closeness to a sworn enemy of my kind. I watched you often through his eyes. And as the two of you grew closer, my jealousy grew. The way he looked at you… and the way I saw you looking
back
through his eyes… I knew I couldn’t live without you, no matter how dangerous it might be, for either of us. I returned two nights ago, staying in the empty house of my family. I was trying to decide how to approach you, what to say, what we could
do
—run away together, elope, get married in secret and live alone on a mountaintop, I couldn’t figure out the right way, the right words. But then when I saw you through Joachim’s eyes, bleeding, I raced from the woods, and found you on the point of death, and knew I had no choice but to turn you.” Tears welled in his eyes: they were little ruby droplets of diluted blood. “I’m so sorry, Bonnie. To take your life… I would never have done so, if there had been any alternative.” He buried his head in my (completely healed) neck. “Now you’ll never be able to have children.” He sobbed.

Lord. Having my tubes tied supernaturally didn’t bother me at all, but I whispered in his ear: “That’s a shame, Edwin, but it’s all right, because I still have
you
, forever, and always.”

“And always, and forever,” he murmured back.

I took to vampirism beautifully. By Sunday night I was walking around, and it’s funny—I didn’t feel stronger, exactly. I felt like I always had. But everything else in the
world
seemed… thinner? Less dense? Less
real
? Like the things that had seemed so solid and immovable when I was alive were now just so many cobwebs, to be brushed away by the merest motion of my hand. I could sense the presence of the other vampires in the house, in a way that has no analogue to my other senses—I didn’t smell them, I could just… tell where they were, how close, in which direction they were moving and with how much velocity.

I sat with the family until late in the night, and they told me things I needed to know about myself and my kind, changes I could expect, drawbacks and advantages… things you mortal readers don’t
need
to know. Oh, how I love having secrets, and becoming a vampire opened me up to a whole new class of secrets. When I continued to say I had no idea who’d attacked me—“I was on the couch, and I realized someone was behind me, and after that, I don’t remember anything”—they vowed they would find out who was responsible and see them brought to justice… and since I wasn’t actually dead and had no intention of letting Harry know I’d been attacked, I got the impression it wouldn’t be
mortal
justice.

I told them I’d be grateful for anything they could do. But I had plans of my own, and they didn’t have anything to do with justice. Justice is cold, remote, and abstract. I was more interested in bloody, immediate, gratifying
revenge
.

Pleasance and Ellen began excitedly talking about wedding plans—no reason I shouldn’t marry Edwin now, they reasoned, since I was fully one of them. I could finish out the school year, of course, and graduate, but why not a summer wedding? Rosemarie sulked her way through the whole evening, not even looking at me, and that’s when I started to have my idea, and to plan my plans.

I sat by Edwin, holding his hand—which no longer felt cold, to me; it felt exactly the same temperature as my own flesh, a reminder that everything in life is entirely relative—and smiled and nodded and talked faux-excitedly about ceremonies and flowers and dresses right along with them. I didn’t really care about the wedding. I had the two things I’d wanted all along: the power of a vampire, and the devotion of my beloved Edwin.

But… it’s a strange thing, and I hate to admit it… Edwin was somehow less alluring, now that I was a vampire. His inhuman beauty no longer seemed quite so inhuman, and indeed, his hair was a trifle greasy, his teeth not particularly even and straight, his blue eyes rather less dazzling. I realized that, since I was no longer in the category of prey, he was no longer the perfectly attractive predator, designed to lure me into his clutches. Don’t misunderstand—he was still very beautiful—but that mysterious quality that made my breath pause and my heart stutter when he looked at me was gone. And for his part, his smiles seemed a bit weaker, a bit more perfunctory, and while gazing into my eyes he sometimes seemed to be thinking about something
other
than how absolutely wonderful I was. I can only assume it’s because I lost my delicious smell when I turned.

But our love was more than just mere physical reactions, of course, it was a
deeper
love, an
eternal
love, and I didn’t doubt for even a moment that it would survive certain minor and inevitable moments of disenchantment.

Love was for later, though. I had murdering to do.

ME, VAMPIRE

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

T
he depressing thing was the normalcy I had to fake. Now that I was an immortal vampire I just didn’t care—I wanted to eat half the world and watch the other half squirm. But Edwin explained that it would be best if I pretended to be what I’d always been (by which he meant, pretended to be what I’d always already pretended to be—a normal girl) until graduation. Then we could announce our plans to get married. If I dropped out of school or just ran away, Harry and my mom would freak and/or mobilize a manhunt, but if I played the true love card after graduation, my parents would be a lot less inclined to squawk, especially when Argyle offered to pay for my college education as a wedding present. (At first I’d thought: College? As if. But then I thought: edible coeds. And it seemed like a pretty good idea.)

So I kept having dinner with Harry most nights; kept going to biology class, even though I knew things about biology that were utterly alien to mortal knowledge; kept going to the cafeteria at lunch, even though I don’t eat… chicken fingers; and kept talking to my friends J and Kelly, even though all I could think about was the pulse of life in their necks.

I’d never been an unpopular girl at school, but I was suddenly boy-nip, and in the days following my transformation I had to give Ike a stern talking-to in order to send him back to J’s banal bed where he belonged. Kelly even got a little flirtatious, and I had sympathy for her inevitable lesbian college roommate, who’d be the subject of Kelly’s experimentation and subsequent heartbreak when she went back home and married a typical male pig farmer or shopkeeper. (Okay, so I didn’t really feel sorry for hypothetical future lesbo roommate; I just thought it was funny.)