“So they’ll like whoever you like?” I was skeptical, because Peter still didn’t like me.
“No, no, that’s not it either.” Jack sighed, and he debated how much he was going to tell me. I didn’t understand what he could still possibly be hiding from since he’d confessed vampirism. “Because I don’t just like you. My blood likes you.”
“Okay, what the hell does that mean?” I actually leaned away from him a little bit, and I’m sure I looked afraid.
“Jack, maybe Ezra would be better suited to talk about that,” Mae gave him an even glare, and he lowered his eyes. Then she turned back to me, smiling warmly. “Ezra really is a bit of an expert on everything. Jack and I still have so much left to learn.”
“You guys aren’t really vampires, are you?” I asked apprehensively, and Mae laughed.
“Oh, love, I’m sorry, but we are.” She tucked a strand of hair back behind my ear, and since I didn’t push her away or flinch, she smiled.
“But you guys don’t sleep in coffins or have fangs and you’re not pale.” I said, then quickly corrected myself. “Well, except for Mae, but even she’s not that pale.”
“We kind of have fangs.” Jack opened his mouth wide and ran his tongue along his teeth, emphasizing the pointed incisors. They weren’t longer or bigger than any other teeth I had seen, but they did look awfully sharp.
“And coffins are just a ridiculous legend. Beds are much more comfortable.” Mae scoffed at the notion.
“But you’re tan. You can’t go in the sun! Wait, can you go in the sun?”
“We can, in fact, but we don’t usually,” Jack continued. “The sun kind of makes us tired. But we won’t burst into flames or die or anything like that.”
“That doesn’t explain the tan,” I pointed out.
“We don’t change from when we were turned, and I didn’t live only indoors before. In fact, I skateboarded a lot so I was out in the sun. When I turned, my skin was full of melanin, and now it always will be.” Jack thought about it for a moment, then corrected himself. “We do change a bit. We improve. I wasn’t quite this handsome, and I had more of a farmer’s tan. But somehow, it evens things and smoothes everything, like gleaning off any fat I had. It’s impossible for a vampire to be fat. We no longer require the storage of anything, so it all dissolves pretty quickly after the turn, except for what we need to look human, like Mae’s breasts.”
“Thanks,” Mae rolled her eyes at him. “And actually, vampires tend to be less pale than most people because our blood isn’t blue.”
“What do you mean?” I furrowed my brow, trying to understand if she was making some kind of aristocratic reference.
“Blood is blue until oxygen hits it.” Mae took my wrist and turned it up, so I could the blue veins coursing underneath my skin. Then she held up hers next to it, and sure enough, the same veins in her arm looked almost deep purple through her pale skin. “We drink our blood, so it’s already been oxygenated.”
“You drink blood.” Until then, I had been trying hard not to really think of it. When I thought of Peter biting me, it had more been about the feeling of everything, and not about the actual act of him drinking my blood. It was almost impossible to imagine Mae or Jack drinking anyone’s blood. Mae was still holding my wrist, running her fingers affectionately on my skin.
“It is a necessity,” Mae whispered sadly.
“But like animal blood, right?” I asked hopefully, but Mae kept her eyes on my wrist, so I looked up over at Jack, who just shook his head.
“We can’t live on animal blood.” Jack kept his pale blue eyes on me, so I had to focus not to look even mildly revolted. “It’s the same reason a person can’t live on a blood transfusion from a dog or rat. What we essentially do is require a weekly blood transfusion to survive. We just have to ingest it.”
“You… you kill people?” I know my voice was trembling, but then Mae’s eyes shot up and both her and Jack looked appalled.
“No! No of course not!” Mae vehemently denied it. “People can lose huge amounts of blood before they die.”
“We just drink blood from people,” Jack elaborated. “It’s essentially a painless process. Our saliva works as like an anesthetic and it makes the wound heal crazy fast.”
“And Ezra’s so good at it that most people don’t even know they’ve been bitten,” Mae explained, somewhat proudly. “Me and Jack aren’t that good. But we live mostly on blood from the blood bank anyway. It’s not quite as good, but its much less complicated.”
“You get blood from the Red Cross?” I pictured Mae and Jack going down to a Red Cross and asking for a pint of blood for the ride home.
“No, not exactly.” Mae let go of my wrist, gently touching my knee as she did, and then smiled at me. “There’s a vampire blood bank. People think they’re donating to some place like the Red Cross, but it’s for us. So we have a fridge in the basement full of blood.”
“Not that Peter or Ezra ever really get into it,” Jack muttered, and Mae shot a look at him.
“They lived too long in the times before blood banks,” Mae said, looking rather apologetic. “They’re purists.”
“So… they… what? How does that work? They just find some random person and bite them?” The thought of Peter biting anyone else made me feel vaguely nauseous.
“No, they have clubs where people willingly donate, and a lot of times, they can pick up girls, who think they’re going on a date and getting a long kiss on the neck, but really they’re just getting a snack,” Mae clarified.
“You’re okay with that?” I asked Mae. Ezra was her husband. It would have to be painful knowing he was biting other people. “Ezra’s out and about dating and drinking other women?”
“It’s not pleasant,” Mae admitted, with a pained expression. “But it’s the nature of who we are. And I’d rather have him seducing a woman than just attacking someone and killing them. It’s the price of eternity, love. I can be with the man I love forever, but he has to kiss other women.” She smiled sadly at me, and I wondered if I’d ever be able to come to terms with it like she had.
“I drink almost entirely bag blood,” Jack interjected brightly, and I turned my attention back to him.
“The night you picked me up, were you going to bite me?” Then, remembering how suddenly drowsy I was and that I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten home, my eyes widened. “Did you bite me?”
“No!” Jack put his hands up defensively under the scrutinizing glares from Mae and me. “No! I didn’t! Honest!” Then he looked sheepish. “I’d actually just come from the club, and I’d … fed, right before I saw you.”
“You mean the clubs I was trying to get into?” I wondered if Jane had ever been picked up by a vampire without knowing it. She probably had, and that served her right.
“No, it’s a vampire one. Well, I guess I don’t know where you guys were trying to go, so you might’ve. Most people don’t know it’s a vampire club. In fact, that’s how I turned.”
“Peter picked you up at a club?” I raised my eyebrow skeptically.
“Nope,” Jack grinned. “I followed these two hot chicks in, and they turned out to be psychotic vampires. Peter was there, looking for something to eat, but he wasn’t paying any attention to me cause I’m a guy, and it’s harder to feed off somebody that isn’t attracted to you. But the girls went crazy and left me for dead. People can lose a lot of blood, but not all of it. Peter found me in the alley behind the club, and for some reason, he took pity on me. He took me back here, and I’ve been here ever since.”
“Do you have to be dead to turn?” I asked.
“No, you can’t be dead,” Jack clarified. “Once you’re dead, you’re dead.
That’s it. Vampires aren’t undead. We’re just a different form of people. Ezra explained it to me that vampirism is a virus, sorta like AIDS, except whereas AIDS makes you sick, this makes you better.”
“It’s a virus?” I looked skeptical.
“I guess.” Jack shrugged. “That’s what Ezra told me. It’s like an evolutionary mutation. As far as Ezra can tell, the oldest known case of vampires only dates back about 1000 years ago, the first time the population reached 300 million. Naturally, as the population grew, so did the amount of vampires. But his theory is that people have no predators. The only thing that really takes people down is weather and disease. The plagues actually helped keep the population in check. When cities were overflowing, a plague would come and knock the numbers down. A vampire is just another kind of plague.”
“Yeah, that’s great and everything, but a virus?” I shook my head in disbelief. “How can a virus do this to you?”
“Again, Ezra is more of an expert than I am,” Jack began. “But it just makes you more efficient. We get exactly what we need all the time. We don’t have to process anything. We live on pure, fresh nutrients. I think it actually kills a lot of the organs in our body, because so much of the human body is spent digesting and utilizing food. We don’t do that. It’s just there already. And it stops decay. When we die, we’re like Styrofoam. We’re here forever. When we get injured, we heal at an alarming rate, because we’re all blood. Blood, skin, muscle, and bones that are stronger than metal.”
“You guys are really vampires?” They had been explaining stuff to me for a long time, but I still couldn’t wrap my head around it. Jack laughed and leaned on the counter.
“That was my reaction at first, too,” he grinned.
“I think that was everyone’s,” Mae agreed.