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

I sound like, then? Come on, Mom, don’t be silly. Anyway, I’m exhausted – I have got to go now and get some stuff done.” There. That sounded reasonable, she thought.

“You might want to start with cleaning your apartment. We both know you aren’t exactly Martha Stewart.”

“Nor would I want to be,” the girl shot back. “Talk to you later, Mom.” She hung up and switched off the phone. “All right! Now what? Ah. That crazy letter.”

She returned to the sofa and read it over. When she got to the end, she stared at the closing. In blood and honor? What the heck did that mean, anyway? While simple on the surface, she had a feeling something more sinister lay behind that phrase. And what was up with the corny names? Kyria was okay, probably Greek, but the Scarlatis surname was way too blood-related to be the woman’s real one. And what was she? A vice president? Of what? The Neck-Biters Association of America? Wait, no. The NBAA was something sports-related, she was sure. She was also sure that its initials stood for words that had something to do with sports, not vampires. Which brought her back to this Kyria Scarlatis person’s honorarium, or whatever it was called. Title? VP. Hmm.

She went into the bathroom to check a few things and discovered that while she hadn’t sprouted fangs or claws, she also had no trace of the werewolf bite on her shoulder. She stopped staring at her teeth and shoulder long enough to realize something was different about her eyes, too. What the heck? They weren’t glowing or anything, and hadn’t turned red or brown. Still blue but different. Maybe – her pupils! They weren’t elongated like a cat’s, or vertical like a sheep’s, but oval. Not too dramatic a change, but enough to make people wonder if they happened to stare into her eyes for more than a second. Although why anyone would do that was beyond her.

She yawned and realized that aside from the minutes when she’d been unconscious, she hadn’t slept. There were no classes today, but she did have to go to work. Grateful that she wasn’t due in until three in the afternoon, she changed into a comfortable set of cotton sweats and went to bed. Before laying down, though, and right after setting her alarm for two-fifteen, she pulled her bed further away from the wall, decided it was still too close, and relocated it to the middle of the room.

No more getting up on the wrong side of the bed for her. Nope. Lord knew what kind of weirdo she might get turned into the next time!

THREE

 

 

Thursday. Arissa did her usual morning spazz when the alarm when off, but forced herself to relax and get out of bed with studied composure. The bed was still in the middle of the room, and would remain there. Rubber doorstoppers had been shoved under the legs from the sides in case she sleepwalked in the middle of the night and tried to push it back.

For the past few days her mother had been trying to contact her, but she’d turned her ringer off “by accident,” leaving apology texts instead of returning the calls. In turn, her mother had managed a few texts of her own, none of them pleasant.

Arissa had only one class on Thursdays, so after her shower she gathered her things and rushed out the door, already planning what she was going to do afterward. Like figure out what to wear to the meeting, for one. And her hair – not much she could do there.

A hand-written note had been left on her kitchen table some time during the night Tuesday, giving her the time and place for the meeting, but no indication that the one who had left it felt at all guilty about breaking into her apartment. After she stopped fuming about that, she decided to start a list of question for these people... creatures... whatever. Right at the top of that list was, "What makes you think you have the right to come and go in my home any damn time you please?" Yeah, the phrasing was rude, but so was breaking into her apartment uninvited. Which brought her to the next question: "Don't you guys need to be invited in first?"

Well, that would have to wait, she told herself. At the moment, she needed to get to school for her Business Statistics class. While Arissa sucked at math in general, she enjoyed this course. The idea of probabilities fascinated her. As she steered through traffic, she was thinking about this, and had to laugh. What was the probability that she would have been turned into a werepire? Heck, what were the odds that such things even existed? Ha!

Pulling into the parking lot, she began the irritating task of finding an open spot that wasn't close to the equator. "What am I going to wear tonight?" she asked aloud, honking at someone backing out of a space and nearly whacking into her right front fender. "Doofus... probably wasn't looking. But huh. The meeting. Should I dress up or - ah! A spot!" She sped up and managed to swerve into the empty parking space without hitting the cars flanking it. "Right! Okay, then! Where was I? Hmm. Maybe it'll be casual. Does it even matter?"

Someone walked past the car parked in front of Arissa's and gave her frown. She couldn't understand why, but then realized she'd been talking to herself. "Crap. Maybe they'll think I'm on a Bluetooth or something.” She got out of the car and headed for the building where her class was held, her thoughts returning to the problem of what would be appropriate to wear that evening. Did it matter? Was there a whole respect thing to worry about? If she looked like a slob would they bite her on principal? Maybe not; she was “protected,” whatever that meant, which was another question on her ever-growing list.

When class ended, she left in a hurry, wanting to give herself enough time to go to the store for anything she might need (like mascara - her current tube was about empty), choose an outfit, take a shower, and get dressed. Halfway between the side door of the school and her car, someone shouted her name. Annoyed, she slowed and looked over her shoulder.

A young man she recognized from another of her classes was jogging toward her, waving. Now what? She stopped and turned toward him. Nice-looking in a gothic way, she concluded; considering her condition, Arissa thought it appropriate that he'd want to talk to her, which made no sense, but not much else was making sense lately, so whatever.

“Riss, hey, sorry to bother you.” He sounded out of breath as he stomped to a halt beside her.

“What’s up…um, Leander, right?” What kind of name was that, anyway? And why was he calling her by her nickname when he didn’t even know her?

“Yeah. Listen, I – how do you know my name?” He raised both brows.

“Same way you know mine, I’d assume.” Put your brows down, buster. “We’re in some class together, but I can’t remember which one.”

“We are?”

That made her more suspicious. “Yes. We are. If you didn’t know that, how did you know my name?”

“Oh. Sorry.” He took a deep breath, blushed, and smiled.

This gave him dimples, and suddenly she didn’t care how he knew her name – until he spoke again.

“Right. I was wondering… will you be at the meeting tonight?”

Arissa was thunderstruck. “You’ve got to be kidding me! You… okay, since you’re standing out here in the sunlight, I assume you’re a - ” she lowered her voice - “a werepire?”

“Like you. Double attack victim, all that.”

“When did this happen?” Not that this mattered, either. He was still cute and nice, which irritated the snot out of her because she sensed within herself a growing interest in him.

He looked away, brows together, lips pursed. Then, with a quick nod, he faced her again. “Four hundred and thirty-six years ago.”

Maybe she’d slammed into that wall again after all, and was in reality lying on the floor of her bedroom, concussed and on the verge of vegetablehood. “Say what?”

“I was twenty-three at the time. Listen, I admit I felt sorry for you, that you’d been attacked and all that, but I also thought it might be cool to have a schoolmate who was like me, so I wanted to at least introduce myself before the meeting. There aren’t a whole lot of us, as you might imagine.”

“To be honest, I hadn’t been imagining a whole lot about any of it since Monday, being busy coping with the insanity of being bitten and whatnot.” She took a step closer and checked his pupils. Yup. Oval. Dang. He also smelled really good. She stepped back again. “To answer your question, yes. I was planning to be there. Not so much because of all the marvelous info I’m sure you’re all going to give me, but mostly to find out who the hell keeps breaking into my apartment and leaving notes.”

He gulped.

She knew.

He apologized, blushing.

She fell in love.

What a mess.

 

*****

 

That evening, after putting up with her phone’s GPS vapid, tinny little voice, she pulled in where it told her to, parked, got out, looked from the address on the note to the building, back at the note, then at the building again. “Really? Really? A church?” Maybe this one didn’t use holy water. Or crucifixes. Or maybe vampires weren’t affected by that stuff after all. “Incredible.”

On time for once, she checked for tow-away-zone signs and fire hydrants – getting a ticket wasn’t on her Got To Have It list – and finding none, went through the iron gates between two granite pillars. An older building than the other structures in this part of town, the church was surrounded by spiked fencing, its slate walkway smoothed by the passage of thousands of feet over the decades. She’d been told to go to the door on the right side of the building, so she followed the path around that way, and entered as instructed.

The aroma of incense, the scent-identifier of every church Arissa had ever entered, flew up her nostrils and made her sneeze. She hated incense, especially the church kind. Pulling a tissue from her purse, she sneezed several more times, blew her nose, and began to feel light-headed. The sound of her allergic reaction echoed up the stairwell in which she’d found herself, and a moment later, a figure appeared at the top step. Vlad.

“Ah, there you are, my dear.”

“I thought I asked you dot to call me that,” she said, nasal and furious.

“Oh, yes. My apologies. Please – join me, will you?”

She rolled her eyes and went up the stairs. At the top, she stared into his. The pupils were normal. The irises were not. They glittered. “Dow what?”

“This way, m- I mean, Arissa.” He waved her forward and she walked with him to a corridor leading away from the main vestibule, and which ran alongside the sanctuary. As they walked, she could hear the sound of voices, a crescendo of murmuring that exploded into conversations when he opened one of the doors. “Here