Serum

-Four-

I groaned and rolled over, nearly falling off the bed. I shoved my hand out, trying to keep my balance. What a stupid nightmare! I righted myself before I could tumble off the rest of the way. My hand rubbed against rough scratchy carpet. Something didn’t seem quite right about that, but my mind was still so fuzzed out I couldn’t grasp what was going on. Snippets of the dream chased themselves around my head. A dull roar filled my ears and the taste of blood was in my mouth. I swallowed dryly and heard a soft rustling from somewhere in front of me. I began to focus, gently cracking my eyes. I felt like groaning again, everything on me felt sore and stiff. Suddenly I realized something. Carpet? We don’t have carpet. I sat up quickly, banging my head on a low roof. A blanket fell from me to the floor.

“Ow!” My voice seemed loud in my own ears. The world around me finally began to register. I was in a car, a car I had never seen before. A tall young woman was sitting in the driver’s seat, every dark strand of hair pulled neatly into place, eyes fixated out the window. I peered around cautiously, but since nothing was happening, I relaxed a bit. I was so tired, I doubted I could get worked up anyway. I stared vaguely at the woman for a while longer, there was something unsettlingly familiar about her. I felt like I should probably be upset about this turn of events, but it was hard enough just keeping my eyes open. After a while, I noticed that we were in the parking lot of a shopping market. Hardly the place for a murder, I decided, head still fuzzy. Background noise that I had registered before, but hadn’t really taken note of, began to buzz in my ears. It was a continual whoosh sound, over and over and over again. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. I clamped my hands over my ears, but the sound just got louder and louder. Eventually a man carrying a shopping bag passed by the car and the sound went with him as he faded from view, finally being muffled as he slid into his vehicle. I sighed, glad that the noise had passed with him. It sounded vaguely familiar but I didn’t know why. It also made me incredibly hungry, which confused me even more. Looking back toward the store, I noticed Conner coming out, quickly followed by a few other people. I began again to register the noise, but something was different, the volume and pace of the whooshing beat upon each other, no two alike. As everyone headed in different directions, Conner coming straight towards us, the sounds also changed pitch, and I suddenly understood. It was their blood! I was hearing the sound of people’s blood running through their bodies! I had heard the same sound many times in the dead stillness of the night, as my own blood pulsed behind my ears, but this was completely different!

“How can you stand that!” I shouted over the noise at the lady who was sitting impassively in the front seat. I noted that my words were somewhat slurred, and a bit hard for even me to understand. I ran my tongue around my mouth, trying to see if something had gone numb. My tongue ran into an unfamiliar bump that scratched my tongue, then another one. I reached up, feeling. Fangs?!? How was that possible, my canines were long and sharp. The woman in the front seat was looking at me curiously, head c****d as if listening. Again I noted the unsettling familiarity in her appearance. Where had I seen eyes like those before?

“Oh, you mean the sound of the blood? You get used to after a while, after all, I grew up with it, so it’s of no real concern to me, unless of course I’m hungry.” She said with a wolfish smile. Her canines stood out in cool contrast with the rest of her normally sized teeth. I probably should have shrank from the sight, but my head still felt befuddled. She turned back around as if dismissing me. The door suddenly popped open, and Conner, with a relieved look on his face, motioned me to scoot over. He slid inside the car, gently shutting the door after him with an almost apologetic look in his eyes. My mind couldn’t take it anymore, there was just too much confusion going on. When he was settled the woman started the car and drove out of the parking lot. Conner turned to me, deliberately not looking at the woman in the front seat.

“I bought these inside, I hope that they fit, I had to sort of guess your size while you were unconscious.” Conner said with a blush. A memory burst through my confusion in a rush.

“But I just changed clothes! You gave them to me!” I blurted, again the slurs cut in. Conner looked a bit embarrassed.

“That was hours ago, besides, you may want to take a look at yourself.” Conner gently responded. I looked down, and was immediately horrified. My clothes were entirely bloodied and disgusting. Brown hair and even a tooth were stuck to the dried blood. Was all that mine? What had happened?

“We couldn’t just leave you there, we were afraid that if you woke up looking like this you might freak out, or you might have hurt yourself or someone else without realizing it, so we brought you along to keep an eye on you.” Conner explained quietly.

“But what happened!?! The last thing I remember was…” Memories in a jumbled heap swarmed through my brain, I couldn’t lay my fingers on a single one. I gripped my head in despair, trying to concentrate. What was the very last thing I remembered?

“Lana, would you like to field this one please.” Conner said in a harsh voice. He was still deliberately not looking at the woman in the front seat, but his eyes seemed to glimmer with intense hatred for her. Something clicked in my head.

“Lana! Your…” I started

“Sister, right.” Conner said with a snarl, finally turning his eyes on her, glaring evilly.

“Well,” The lady who I now knew as Lana began “Silly little Conner, thinking he could hide you from me.” She gave a girlish giggle, never taking her eyes from the road.

“Of course I discovered you and imagine it, a vampire whose best friend is a human! What would everybody say? I mean, human’s are so far below us, and we feed on them for heaven’s sake. Well, I decided to hunt you down and kill you. Conner stopped me at that for a bout 3 weeks or so. Soooo, having studied some science, well quite a lot of science, I decided to rid our family of our little miscreant. I began working to develop a vaccine against vampirism. Unfortunately, or fortunately, however you look at it, the vaccine back-fired and I actually developed a serum to turn humans into vampires. How neat things work out. So since I couldn’t rid our family of Conner or give him what he so desperately wanted, nor could I kill you because of Conner, I just decided to recruit you to our ranks. A few hours ago when I stumble across you two foolishly trying to hide yourselves from me, I waited till Conner was out of the way and you were in the open. As soon as Conner opened the door, you unbelievably gave me a perfect target. I simply stunned you and injected the serum into you before Conner could stop me. I’ve become quite adept at it, as I’ve been chasing down “lab rats” for a week or so to see how well my serum would work. At first, when I was hunting vampires, I noticed the serum wasn’t working, so I tried it on a human to see what would happen. Imagine my surprise when I created one of our own! Of course, the process of change is quite ugly, the skin usually sheds, hair and teeth fall out, and you become somewhat of a bloody mess as your body’s DNA is altered to that of a vampire. Skin tones become darker, hair color becomes a deeper shade, teeth rearrange to make room, and all kinds of little details change like that. Obviously, the serum isn’t quite perfect yet, but I had to do something before someone else did. The serum isn’t always permanent, sadly temporary in about 47% of studies, and there’s still a few flaws concerning anatomy that I need to work out. For instance, your canines are too long, as well as your neck. Most vampires are perfectly proportioned to be the perfect hunting machine. With that long neck, you may have to lower your head to get optimal speeds out of your runs.” She once again gave a girlish giggle. By this time she had pulled the car into a drive-way and shut the car off. She looked at me through the rear-view mirror.

“I guess when you changed clothes you never considered that your scent could transfer from the dirty ones to the clean clothes if you dragged the dirty clothes out from under the clean clothes the way you did. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, cover up with that blanket, we don’t want to cause a stir with all that blood.” Lana said to me as she got out of the car and walked towards the house.

“I’ll carry the clothes, here let me help you.” Conner murmured quietly as he gave me a hand out of the car. I was clinging to the blanket, but the moment I stepped out of the vehicle, the bright sunlight struck my eyes, and I swayed weakly, sucking in my breath. Something was slipped over my ears and onto the bridge of my nose.

“The light’s just so bright it hurts my eyes.” I breathed the slur still strong in my ears. It was like the time that my uncle had shone a flashlight straight into my eyes in the dark, for minutes after that I couldn’t see at all, only much, much worse. I thought I might be going blind, only I had always imagined it as going dark instead of becoming pure light.

“I know, it’s like that with all of us, so I bought an extra pair of shades, you won’t need them all of the time, but try to carry a pair if possible. Lana’s lucky, she’s tinted all her windows in her car and house so she doesn’t have to worry about it most days. She even started getting tinted contact lenses. Our eyes are just adjusted for night vision, so we’re extra sensitive to light.” Conner responded as he walked me towards the door. I leaned weakly on him, grateful for his support. I still felt stiff and sore, and I noticed my muscles stretched uncomfortably. It was almost as if I had just gotten through exercising for a long time and my muscles were ready to rest. Once inside Conner deftly shut the door, blocking out the sun’s light, and I removed the sunglasses. The dull throbbing of his blood faded as he walked away from me to a room down a hall from the living room area.

“The bathroom’s down here!” Conner called. I followed in his footsteps and found him easily. “I thought you might like to clean up a bit too. Just put the soiled clothing in the shopping bag and we’ll dispose of them.” Nodding, I stepped inside the bathroom, and listened as Conner’s blood faded back down the hallway. It wasn't quite the sound of his heart, I determined, but more the sound of all of the pressure or flow of his blood through his veins. Like listening to ocean waves. I closed my eyes for a moment as the sound settled at a distance from me and tried to calm down.

Stripping quickly, I left the bag outside the door as instructed, and stepped into the shower. I had never seen so much blood. It just kept coming off and washing down the drain, a continual red tide. I eventually sat down, legs folded under me, and just stared at all the red. I was so confused at everything that had happened so far, and yet too exhausted to care much. A deep sense of despair was beginning to settle over me, and I was pretty sure I could just go to sleep right here and be happy to shut out the world for a while. I waited until the blood finally stopped running off of me to shut off the water, and then pushed the curtain aside and dried off weakly with a fluffy white towel left on the toilet. Dimly I noted that the cuts on my feet had healed over, there were only light pink scars left. My attention jerked back, that wasn’t possible! I had just gotten those cuts this morning! Re-examining them, I slowly ran my fingers over the slight pinkish scars, shocked. I shelved my curiosity and fear for another time, though the thought of the cuts kept buzzing around in the back of my head, not quite leaving me alone. I busied myself by changing into the clothes provided for me, which were a pretty good fit, Conner’s guess-work aside. I checked my appearance in the mirror before brushing my hair. Shocked, I looked around to see if someone stood behind me. Seeing nothing but the wall, I turned back, reaching shaking fingers towards the mirror, to assure myself it was there. My hair was a deep shade of black, my skin a darkly pigmented color, like a deep tan, but natural, and my teeth when I opened my mouth, were probably the biggest shock of all. Like Conner, I had pockets in my lower lip for the canines, but unlike Conner’s they were a bit longer. The “fangs” were sharp as daggers. There was a stranger in the mirror, and the stranger was me.

 I groaned quietly, there was no way I was going to pass this by mom.