Double Take - A.J. Cole (classic fiction txt) 📗

Arissa got up on the wrong side of the bed. She’d turned herself around during the night, ending up with her head where her feet would normally be, and when the alarm went off she tried to jump out of bed and slammed into the wall instead.

Once her nose stopped bleeding and her eyes uncrossed, she managed to get washed and dressed without further self-inflicted pain. She even got to school in one piece and was beginning to think her morning screw-up was no more than a fluke. But then she went to computer class and discovered her fingers had somehow developed little minds of their own, and nearly everything she typed had to be deleted and re-typed, then re-re-typed, several times over. By the time she managed to get one coherent sentence done without errors, she was ready to stab the screen with her pen. Knowing this could cause her sudden demise by electrocution, however, she opted for the ever-popular key-slam.

“Miss Martin, kindly stop banging on those keys. If you break them, you buy the school a new keyboard.”

Glaring up at Mrs. Crowther, a teacher she liked on any other day, Arissa grumped an apology. Today, she didn’t like anyone. After her fourth failed attempt to type “and,” she would have felt hateful toward angels had any happened to cross her path.

So it came as no surprise that on the way home, her car stalled. Having decided that the way her luck was going, the highway could be a greater hazard to her health than normal, she had taken a back road. But because of the way her luck was going, she got it wrong.

After the twenty-third attempt to restart her old vehicle, she gave up, deciding to wait a while and give it a chance to recover from whatever had made it conk out in the first place. Calling for help wasn’t an option, since her phone had run out of charge halfway through her fourth class, and she’d forgotten to bring the car-charger.

Only one other car had come by, but the driver had passed her at dust-kicking speed, not even turning to look at her while zooming by. Beyond that brief encounter with humanity, Arissa felt as if she may as well have been alone on the planet.

On her left, a field stretched out flat until the ground rose into a small hill topped with a line of wooden fencing. To her right where she’d rolled onto the sandy shoulder was a forest. She considered walking across the field to see what was beyond the hill, figuring she could call her road-service company from the home of the fence’s owner. But that hill looked far away, and the forest looked spooky now that she wasn’t driving past it, so she waited a bit longer.

As the sky darkened, a full moon topping the horizon, Arissa tried starting the car again, thinking she’d given the stupid engine enough time to cool down, if that was what it needed. Teasing, the engine almost turned over but then, with the cruelty of an Inquisition torturer, stopped once more.

“Crap!” She got out, slamming the door behind her and wondering if pelting it with dirt and small stones would scare it into functioning. She’d yanked on the hood release, but when she went to the front of the car and tried lifting it, the latch got caught on something and the hood refused to open.

Arissa hated “chick-flicks,” refused to cry at any kind of movie unless her date was stepping on her foot by accident, and in general was good at toughing out difficult situations on her own without getting weepy. Angry, yeah. Furious, sometimes. But the whole damsel-in-distress thing revolted her. So it was a testimony to how frustrated and thoroughly defeated she felt that she crossed her arms over the hood, put her head down on them, and sobbed.

The immediacy of her boo-hooing caused her to ignore another sound that should have alarmed her far more than her vehicular predicament: growling. Distant at first, but growing closer by the second. Did Arissa sense the impending danger? Nope. The flood-gates had been opened, and she was too tired to try closing them yet. Not until she got knocked to the ground by something gigantic, furry, and incredibly stinky did she conclude something was wrong. She fell sideways onto her right arm, which under the best of circumstances wasn’t a great thing, and among the sudden chaos of thoughts assaulting her was one that said, “Er, I think you just broke your arm.”

Before that could process itself into a scream of pain, and before the severity of her situation could induce a scream of fear, something bit deeply into her left shoulder, eliciting a scream of agony. She kicked upward with her left, free foot and made contact with soft flesh. It was the first thing she’d gotten right all day.

The creature must have been male, because as soon as the toe of her shoe found its mark, the smelly whatever-it-was released her shoulder and gave a shriek that almost sounded human. A moment later, it was gone.

Interesting.

She rolled the rest of the way onto her back, wondering how she was going to get up. Both arms were useless, she’d pulled a muscle in her groin mid-kick, and didn’t want to find out how much more pain she could experience.

“I think I’m in shock, too,” she whispered. “Maybe I’ll die here.”

“Maybe you will.”

She blinked. Wonderful. Now she was hearing voices. “Yep, I’ve slipped a gear. Guess I’ll just wait until I’ve finished bleeding to death. Then I can… die? Great. Ouch. Ow….” The serotonin or whatever it was that keep humans from feeling the worst of an injury, went off to read a book or maybe do some gardening, because the dull ache turned nasty and sharp. “Aw, hell, ow!”

“Poor little girl,” said the voice, sounding closer.

“You got that right. This really hurts!” A large tear rolled out of one eye and down to her ear. It tickled, and she tried to raise her hand to wipe away the moisture, but her nerve endings had other ideas. “OWWWW!”

“I do believe you’ve broken something.”

“Gee, are you always this observant?” she managed through clenched teeth.

“Not always.” And then the source of the voice showed itself.

She screamed.

*****

What a lovely dream she was having! A handsome man held her close as he bent his head toward her throat. Feeling a bit floaty, she waited for his kiss, noting that he had attractive, unkempt hair, dark eyes that glittered in a most intriguing way, a beautiful, sculpted mouth, strong white teeth with elongated canines….

A second later, those canines sank into the side of her neck, and she could feel her life draining away as the man began to drink. It didn’t hurt, but was disconcerting.

Would you look at that… a vampire. I’m being killed by a –

“Damn it!” The creature pulled back, lowered her to the ground, and spat out a mouthful of her blood. “What the hell!”

Astonishment came at her from three directions – one, that he had dropped her with care as if not wishing to cause her further pain or harm; two, that he didn’t like how her blood tasted; and three, that it had taken her this long to realize she wasn’t dreaming. As soon as that third version of the aforementioned astonishment kicked in, she used a bad word. There wasn’t a whole lot else she could do, between one arm being broken, the other badly injured, and a pulled muscle that would keep her from running even had she been able to stand up. Add a pissed-off vampire to the mix and her use of foul language to cope made perfect sense.

The man finished retching and doing other gross things, and spun back around to glare down at her. “Why were you lying on the ground?”

“Seriously? You didn’t see what happened?”

“No, I didn’t. I just assumed you’d tripped or something and cut your shoulder open. I could smell your blood from about a mile inside the forest, and was drawn to you.”

“You’re an idiot. Ow. It’s starting to hurt again.”

“Did something bite you?”

“Besides you, you mean? Yeah, genius. I was standing in front of my useless car because the engine stalled and I couldn’t get the hood open, when something knocked me down and took a chunk out of my shoulder. I kicked it in what I hope was the most sensitive spot possible and it ran off. Then you showed up and decided I was on the menu, too, creep. Ow.”

“Be careful, little human - ”

“Oh, shut up. What can you possibly do worse to me at this point? Kill me? Fine. Go ahead.” She turned her head to expose her already punctured throat.

“You must have been attacked by a werewolf. Thank goodness I didn’t swallow.”

“Is that like ‘I didn’t inhale’?”

“What?”

“Never mind. Look, either help me, kill me, or get lost. I am so not in the mood for you right now. Or ever, come to think of it…” She groaned in pain and closed her eyes.

He slipped an arm under her shoulders, raising her from the ground, and she concluded that the movie was about to start. The one about her life. That final review of all she’d done, both good and bad, before her grand exit from the world. Well, that didn’t happen. What happened was his hand pulling her mouth open, the feel of something being thrust in – his wrist, she thought – and the metallic wetness of blood pouring past her lips and down her esophagus.

“Drink. That’s right. Good girl. The pain should start going away soon. Ah, yes. A little more. Good, good.”

He seemed to be enjoying this. She, on the other hand, was totally grossed out. Still, he was right about the pain. As disgusting as the whole drinking blood thing was, she felt herself not only being freed from the pain of her injury and wounds, but healing. How bizarre. And then the strangest thing of all happened. Her heart slowed down almost to a complete halt, her need for air changing to a need for blood, and she blacked out.

The apartment looked the same as it had when Arissa left that morning: same walls, same furniture, same mess. Yet something was off. She had been altered in ways that would probably take her a long time to comprehend, which wouldn’t have bothered her had it been a normal sort of change. Normal, that is, according to legend standards. But no, Arissa had never done things “normally” in her whole life.

For instance, the way she learned to ride a bicycle. Her father had removed the training wheels but said that since she’d been riding with them both raised already, and was thus technically riding without them, he left her to figure out the rest. And she did, except that after falling over eight or nine times, the handlebars had been knocked crooked, and she ended up riding the bike that way. When her father noticed this,