Matters of Life and Undeath

I sat up in bed, my heart racing, and swallowed the scream just in time as I recognized the spiky hair. I flicked on the lamp by my bedside. "Arianna? You scared the crap out of me. What's wrong?"

She wasn't staring at me but rather right past my head, at a blank spot on the wall. Her glamour eyes looked as dead as her real ones. "I don't understand it. Any of it."

"I'm sorry?"

Her eyes focused on me, and she shook her head slowly. "Lend told me what happened. About the vampire. Evie, I don't want to be one. This isn't me, this thing, this living, endless nightmare I've become. I shouldn't exist. I wish I didn't." Her voice was low, even. It was scarier than if she were upset or crying. "Did you know my name isn't Arianna? It was Ann. I hated that name. Plain and boring, like me, and my life, and my family. I hated my family, too. They were WASPs, as middle-class and conventional as possible. My mom did crafts and worked on the school board, and my dad was an accountant. They wanted me to be blond, and happy, and on teams. They were always pushing teams-swim, cheer, track, it didn't matter. They wanted me to fit somewhere. That was the last thing I wanted.

"My mom and I used to fight over what color my hair was, my newest piercing, my music. When I dropped out and left for fashion school, I didn't say good-bye, or thank you, or I love you. I was glad to leave them. They told me I was being stupid, moving to a big city where I didn't know anyone and barely had enough money to live. I didn't care. I was finally going to figure out who I was, find somewhere I could be different.

"Then I met Felix, and he was dark and delicious and everything my family wasn't. He told me I belonged with him, that our love would last forever, that he saw who I really was, who I could be. He promised to show me the world. I never noticed that his world was always night.

"And then he bit me, and the first time I liked it. But then he did it again, and drank my blood, and I passed out. When I woke up, he told me what he was. I didn't believe him, thought he was crazy. I'd let him in too fast, and he knew where I went to school, where I worked, where I lived. I didn't feel safe anywhere. So I went home. I got there at night, pulled up in front of the house. I could see my parents through the bay window, reading in the living room, and it was light, and warm, and safe. I started up the walk, and then Felix stood from where he was sitting on my porch, waiting for me.

"My parents found me there the next morning, dead."

I fought back tears. I'd never heard her talk about how this happened to her. Vampires had always made the least sense to me-how could a human become an immortal paranormal, and why did they have glamours? Werewolves were weird, sure, but they didn't have immortality or glamours. Raquel had never been able to explain where vampires came from. All she knew was that in order to become one, you have to be bitten more than once over the space of a month or so, and the vamp has to leave you alive just enough for the change to take place before your heart stops. It's not easy, and for the most part vampires have no interest in swelling their ranks. Good thing, too, because if all it took was one bite, the world would have been overrun by bloodsuckers centuries ago.

Arianna always seemed so tough, so jaded, sometimes I even wondered if she had sought out a vampire and been changed on purpose. In spite of her emotionless tone, my heart broke knowing the truth-she was just a girl trying to find a place to fit in. It sounded familiar.

She continued. "Of course, I don't remember them finding me. The next thing I knew, I woke up in a morgue. Felix was there, waiting for me, with this look on his face. He was so excited. He thought he'd done something wonderful."

"Where is he now?" I whispered.

"I went with him, because I had nowhere else to go and no idea how to live as a vampire. Then he picked out a lonely, artistic girl, we stalked her, and he lured her into an alley for us."

My stomach clenched. I didn't think Arianna had ever killed a person. Did David know about her past?

She closed her eyes. "And when Felix lulled her into bending her head to the side and offering us her neck, I killed him."

"Wait-you killed him?"

She looked at me for the first time since she started her story. "I was already this thing, this mockery of life. He took away everything that I was, everything I could have been. I wasn't going to let him do that to anyone else."

I sat, dumbly, with no idea what to say. She and David were total pacifists when it came to dealing with other paranormals, but she'd killed another vamp to protect an innocent girl. Did that make what I did okay, then? Because Uber-vamp would have hurt other people. Carlee, the other kids. I know he would have. I shook my head, focusing. "Arianna, I'm so sorry."

She smiled sadly. "Doesn't matter. Eventually I found David, and here I am. And here I'll stay, because eternal life is no life at all, and I have no idea what to do about it. Ann's dead, and I'm stuck here, dead and alive and neither."

I put my hand on her shoulder. "You're alive! You're still a person."

She looked at me, her eyes sharp once again. "Don't lie to me, Evie. You can see exactly what I am."

I cringed, wondering how bad a job I'd done all these months of pretending like I wasn't horrified by the way she looked under her glamour. "That's not you, though!"

"I know what I am. I just don't understand why." She stood. "I shouldn't have woken you up. Sometimes I like to watch you sleep, though. I wish I could sleep. Sleep and never wake up."

Before I could say anything she walked out of my room and out of the apartment. I sat, stunned, then flopped back onto my bed.

Why had I ever thought life would be easier out of the Center?