Call of the Vampire (12 page)

“No, not exactly fighting,” I said. “Blossom’s got a new boyfriend, so... you know how that goes.”

“Oh.” My mom bobbed her head in understanding. “Got it.”

As usual, I couldn’t sleep, so I took the notebook I’d been using as my dream journal and flipped to the back. There I started writing down everything Jessie had told me about his world. After about an hour, my eyelids started to droop, and I turned off the light.

I was in the forest again, but this time it was daylight, and I wasn’t frightened. Not at all. In fact, I was blissfully happy. Everything surrounding me was very green and lush. Birds were hopping around in the trees, and butterflies wafted past. I was with someone I adored, and he adored me. Our faces were so close together that, whenever I tried to look at him, I couldn’t see his whole face, I could only see his eyes. They were gray and beautiful, and they twinkled sometimes when he smiled. This time they were not filled with hate, but a much happier emotion. I wondered if it was love. Even though I wasn’t afraid, there was something unusual about the eyes. My dream shifted, and the eyes became distorted in a way I couldn’t quite figure out. The gray color was uncommon, that was for sure, but there was something else that was puzzling me. I began to focus on just one of his eyes, and it became larger and larger in a way that only makes sense in dreams, but still there was something odd. Finally, it came to me. Besides being magnified, his eye was inverted. I was somehow viewing it upside down. Then the dream shifted again, and everything went back to normal.

None of it made any sense to me, but I woke up in an excessively good mood. I quickly wrote down everything I could remember in my dream journal / vampire log and headed down for breakfast.

Mom looked up from her coffee as I entered the kitchen. “What have you got planned today?”

“I don’t know,” I told her as I hunted for cereal.

“I was thinking we could visit Grandma Gibson and then maybe do a bit of shopping.”

Mom had set a good trap. I actually wasn’t feeling up to a Grandma Gibson run, but the temptation to go shopping was strong. “This is going to sound awful,” I said, “but do we have to do the Grandma Gibson part?” I saw the hurt look on my mother’s face and quickly added, “I’ve visited her twice in the past two weeks, you know.”

“I know, honey. And I thought that was very sweet of you,” she said. “But I wanted to spend some time with you, and I really owe her a visit.”

“Okay,” I relented. “I’m in.” The guilt I would feel from not going wasn’t worth the mild inconvenience of going. Besides, if I was in an old age home, I’d want my family to visit me as much as possible. The least I could do was suck it up and go see my great grandmother for an hour a week.

As we signed in, the lady at the front desk said, “Oh, I’m so glad some of Lillian’s family is coming to see her today. She woke up this morning and, I don’t know, she’s really been having a hard time.” Not exactly what I was hoping to hear. Grandma Gibson had been pretty lucid during my last visit.

It started as soon as we walked into the room. Mom tried to be cheerful with, “Hello, Grams. It’s me—Helen.” I hung back in the doorway, but Mom walked straight into the room.

As usual, Grandma Gibson was at her table, a deck of cards laid out in rows before her. “Helen?” she said, sounding confused.

“That’s right, Grammy,” Mom replied. “And look who’s back to see you—Aurora.” Mom gestured for me to actually enter the room.

When Grandma Gibson saw me, her eyes grew wide. “Lettie,” she gasped. “Where have you been? You didn’t go to meet
him
again, did you?” Her whole body was tense, her hands quaking over the cards.

My mother looked at me and almost imperceptibly shook her head. Picking up on her cue, I stepped closer and said, “Of course not, Gra... uh... Lilly. I didn’t meet him. It’s over between us. I’m never going to see him again.”

My words seemed to calm Grandma, and she became a little less rigid in her chair. “I’m so happy to hear you say that. I know he’s handsome, and I know he’s rich, but he’s evil. They all are. The whole family are creatures from hell.”

I opened my mouth to speak but then choked back the words because my impulse was to shout, “You’re wrong. He’s not evil. He’s wonderful. You just don’t understand him.” I had managed to stop myself but just barely. My mom would think I was nuts, but in all likelihood, Grandma and I would be talking about the same person. This realization made me feel a little sick to my stomach.

“It’s a beautiful day today,” my mother interjected. “Would you like to sit outside for a while?”

There were tears in Grandma Gibson’s eyes. She reached out to me. “Come hold my hand, Lettie, and let me look at you. I’m so glad you’re safe.”

“Well, that was interesting,” Mom said to me when the visit was over and we’d climbed into the car. “I’m sorry she was so stressful today, but I’m really proud of the way you handled it.”

And then I was crying.

“Oh, sweetie,” my mom said, wrapping her arms around me. “I’m sorry if she made you feel bad. She’s just old and confused most of the time. You just happen to remind her of her sister. Being nice to her and assuring her that you wouldn’t meet whatever guy Lettie eventually ran off with was probably the kindest thing you could ever do for her.”

“Do you think Lettie lived?” I managed to choke out between sobs. “I mean, do you think she just ran away and got married, or do you think something happened to her?”

“I don’t know, honey.” My mom petted my hair. “I’d like to think she eloped.”

“Then why didn’t she ever talk to her family again? Why didn’t she ever visit?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she thought she wouldn’t be forgiven.”

“But Grandma misses her so much. Lettie’s been gone for like seventy years, and Grandma still worries about her. It’s just so horrible.”

“That’s why it’s so wonderful when you visit,” Mom told me. “She gets to see Lettie again. I know it’s hard on you, but it’s such a wonderful gift.” She popped the glove box and rooted around for some tissues.

“I know,” I said, my words muffled by the tissue she handed me as I wiped my nose. “It’s just hard, sometimes. It really freaks me out.”

“Well, what do you say to ice cream for lunch?” Mom put on her seatbelt. “I think having to pretend to be the ghost of Lettie Gibson warrants a little calorie fest.”

A huge part of me wanted to tell my mother the truth of why I was so upset. And in my old reality, that would have been the right thing to do. But the supernatural factor had me confused. If I started telling my mom about vampires at the castle, she would probably have me psychologically evaluated rather than helping me unravel my feelings for someone who was obviously dangerous.

“A calorie fest sounds great,” I managed to say as I tried to reel in my emotions. “Sorry I got all weepy. It just scares me thinking about what might have happened to Lettie.”

“Don’t I know it.” Mom backed the car out of the parking spot. “Every week, I think about switching over to some less emotionally taxing work. Let someone else tackle the tough stuff and just grab something with better pay. Become a cog in middle management somewhere.”

“Why don’t you?” I asked, not because I thought she should, but just out of curiosity.

“Because there are a lot of girls out there like Lettie, who need someone to turn to when they get in a tight spot. Or need someone to count on when things go wrong. Someone to help them make sense of their lives and move forward. In a weird way, Lettie Gibson inspired me to become the person I am today.”

She was driving, but I leaned over, put my head on her shoulder, and wrapped my arms around her. “I’m so glad I have you for my mom,” I told her.

Mom actually offered to get me a couple of different outfits while we were shopping, but I acted like I only wanted a skirt, two t-shirts, and some new tennies. All of them mega on sale, of course. I knew things were tight, and I wasn’t about to make them tighter by being needy about clothes. It was better to have a lean wardrobe and my mom helping people with the work that she did than an overstuffed closet and lost girls having no one to turn to. Besides, if I ever got desperate for something designer, Blossom was always super cool about lending me stuff.

I didn’t know how I felt about seeing Jessie again. My heart and my head were complete polar opposites. I refused to be one of those females who got caught up with an abusive guy and kept going back to him no matter how violent he was. But Jessie had been nothing but kind to me, saving me from a variety of creeps and never laying a hand on me. Still, he was a vampire. The undead didn’t have the best reputation. My head hurt just thinking about it.

There was one question I needed answered, and it would dictate my actions forever after. I just had to wait for Jessie and force him to tell me. I needed to know the truth about what happened to Lillian Gibson.

Jessie situated himself on the roof that night. “What’s wrong?” he asked, as soon as he got a look at my face.

“Mom and I went to see Grandma Gibson this afternoon,” I told him.

“How is Lillian?”

I gave an honest reply. “Not great. She’s losing it a bit.” I tapped my temple. “Half the time she thinks I’m her long lost sister and spends a lot of time warning me about the man I’m seeing and telling me his whole family is dangerous.”

“I see,” Jessie said, frowning. “You should probably listen to your grandmother. I’m sure she’s right.”

“How many questions do I have left?”

Jessie spread his hands, palms upward. “You tell me.”

Rather than our usual debate, I decided to just forge ahead. Taking a deep breath, I launched into, “What was your relationship with Colette Gibson, and how did she die?”

Running his hand through his hair several times, Jessie looked down. “I can tell you about our relationship, but I can’t tell you about how she died because I honestly don’t know.”

I said nothing, just waited.

“I was still a very new vampire when we came to America. Just a boy. We managed the blood supply, even back then, with a story about a hemophiliac brother who needed daily blood transfusions. No one really knew what the disease was back then, so it was pretty easy. We set up a small infirmary in a back room of the castle. Townsfolk could come to the back door to donate, and we’d give them a fairly generous payment. A lot of families were able to supplement their income that way.”

“And nobody found it suspicious?”

“Not really. You have to remember, this was back in the thirties. There was no Internet or television or anything. And a lot of people were pretty darn poor. Most people were just happy to hand over a few pints of blood for some food money.”

“And that’s how you met Lettie? Selling her blood?”

“No, our housekeeper hired her and your grandmother as maids.”

“Didn’t anyone find it weird that you were asleep all day and only got up at night? That would have probably tipped me off.”

“The castle doesn’t have a lot of windows, and we claimed the whole family suffered from a sensitivity to light. Which, in a way, we do.” He shrugged with the small joke. “People are less likely to question eccentricities if they are getting paid well, and we made sure to pay slightly better than what was customary at the time.”

“So Lettie was hired as a maid at the castle and...” I coaxed him back on track.

“I noticed her beauty immediately, of course. She was so beautiful yet so very modest. She never took it seriously when people would praise her appearance. But that wasn’t what made me fall in love with her.”

“What was?” I hated myself for asking, but couldn’t stop.

He then said something I wasn’t expecting. “It was because she was kind. To everyone. It didn’t matter who. She was particularly worried about Arthur, our fictional sick brother. Staff weren’t allowed to enter his room, but she would always make up a bouquet of wildflowers and leave them in a vase outside his door for the nurse to take in to him. She said she wanted to bring him a bit of nature to keep his spirits up.”

“She was kind to you?” I wondered. It seemed incredible that such a handsome boy would fall for a girl because of her kind nature. That wasn’t something that happened too frequently in the modern world.

“Yes, very kind to me.” He smiled at the memory. “I began to watch her. To find excuses to run into her. She was a great lover of books, and I arranged it so she could borrow as many as she liked from our private library.”

Nice, and she liked to read
, I thought. That didn’t sound like anything that would draw the attention of a boy in my high school.

“One evening, I caught her looking in my direction the way I was always looking in hers. Our eyes met, and I felt like a flame had been kindled inside of me,” he said, and I swear there were tears glistening in his eyes.

I reached out of the window and laid my hand on his sleeve while he collected himself. I desperately wanted to touch his cheek, his hair, anything really, but I knew that would make me shudder, and that seemed inappropriate given his emotional state.

Jessie continued with, “I began to court her but in secret. I knew my family wouldn’t approve.”

“Did she know that you...” I tried to figure the polite way to ask a delicate question. “Did she know about you?”

“She knew our family had a dark secret and we weren’t like regular people, but I didn’t want to just come out and tell her the full truth all at once because I knew it would frighten her too much.”

“You wanted to make her your companion?”

“No,” Jessie said in a defensive tone. “I wouldn’t have done that to her. I didn’t want her to have that kind of life.”

“Then what were you thinking could happen between you? I mean, given that she was human and you’re a vampire.”

“It’s rare, but under very special circumstances, vampires and humans can be together as equals. The Bishops have to approve it, and it usually means you’ll be shunned by the vampire families.”

“You guys have bishops?” I couldn’t keep from interrupting him. “Like church bishops?”