Chapter 8: Anamorphosis

"The call of death is a call of love." – Hermann Hesse

I was asleep, and I knew that because my parents were still alive. We were in the car with the darkness all around, as if we'd entered a long tunnel and we had to drive through it. I didn't want to, but in my dream I didn't seem to care as I sat in the backseat, buckled up tight and holding Edgar. I smiled in my sleep I think, because I'd forgotten him completely. Edgar the Bear, soft and stuffed and in my arms.

What a nice dream, except for my shoulder. It hurt and when I looked down at it, I could see I was bleeding. I was bleeding in the back of the car and my parents were in the front. My dad drove while my mom slept with her head against the glass, breathing fog on the window as we sailed through the night.

I thought I should wake Mom up and tell her about my shoulder, but I sat there because I knew I couldn't. I had to sit very still because it was coming and I held my bear tight, Edgar, even though I knew I'd never hold him tightly enough. He'd fly out of my hands forever in a minute. I'd never see him again, except when I dreamed.

And the car grew dark, inside that tunnel, and cold now. The wind was in my hair, howling in my ears, and there she was. Angela, standing in the road, standing in the light in front of us. Looking at me, smiling with her arms wide. It was her and it had always been her, appearing out of the dark.

My dad didn't yell. He didn't make a sound, he just jerked in his seat, his strong arms turning the steering wheel, too hard, too fast. Yanking us around and over and the whole world turned upside down. I wanted to stop him. I knew her. We couldn't hurt her, she was already dead and already moving out of the way, stepping aside to let us pass like a ghostly matador.

The car went one way, and then the other, throwing us all left and right and left again. My mom's head hit the window she'd been resting against and it shattered suddenly and silently. All those broken pieces of glass flying through the air, glittering like diamonds. Shining like stars in the dark. And for a second everything was quiet until we hit that big tree and Edgar was gone. Ripped away and flying out of my arms to heaven.

"How do you feel?" Angela asked gently, washing my shoulder and trying to smile.

"It hurts," I said, blinking at the lights. We were in a kitchen, a tiny one, and I was leaning against the refrigerator and sitting on the dirty linoleum floor.

We were in a small apartment, an ugly place, one of those two room flops you could rent by the day or week. I'd been there before, they were all the same, and the people who lived in them were ugly and stupid and poor. There was someone living here, in this one, a man I thought, judging from the pornography that littered his small kitchen table. The empty bottles of cheap liquor and overflowing ashtrays. A mess everywhere. Dirty. Greasy. Stained and stinking of a life less lived than endured.

A man was dying here and he was out for the moment. Working maybe, or more likely stalking the video arcades, looking at women he'd never know, that didn't even exist except in cellophane wrappers and digital video. He'd spend his last dollar on dreams, jerking off or getting drunk. Dragging dead smoke into his lungs. No one lived in places like this, they just died here.

There was another man there too, and he was not gone. I could smell him and that alone was enough to tell me he didn't belong in that place. He smelled foreign and alive and I turned my head to see him at the sink, washing his hands, or maybe something else. He smelled human and dressed like a doctor, with the white coat and the funny green pants, the scrubs that doctors wear. He didn't look at me, not yet, but he moved like he knew I watched him.

He was frightened.

"I'm hungry," I breathed, staring at his shoulders as they rocked back and forth.

"Not yet," Angela told me, whispering. "We need him."

She was hungry too, famished as Angela hadn't fed in many days now, and she was feeling it. Bringing me here had taken a lot of her strength, and finding the doctor while I'd slept, convincing him to leave his hospital and come with her, that would have drained much of Angela's reserves as well. She wasn't very good with the thrall.

"The girl..." The doctor turned around, holding a plastic plate with some instruments on it, medical tools, and he froze when he saw me awake and hungry. I didn't look like a girl.

"Do whatever you have to," Angela told him, her voice soft and soothing, telling him it was okay. Working on his confused mind.

I sat naked from the waist up, with a hole in my shoulder, just above my right breast and my flesh had been bruised, turned dark by the wound. The rest of me had taken an unnatural hue, very pale like chalk with a wax-like texture to my skin. My mouth was open, showing him my fangs while my red eyes stared into his. I needed blood. I wanted him. I couldn't help it and I felt my hands making fists, digging razor sharp nails into my palms.

"The bullet is still inside her," he said slowly, the fear that had filled him to overflowing a moment before evaporated. He suffered now only the urge to do as Angela told him. "And, uh ... her shoulder is fractured. We'll have to set it."

Angela sat with me and held me as tightly as she dared, wrapping her arms around me so that my own arms were trapped against my body. She kissed my cheek and whispered soft words to sooth us both, the doctor and me. He was young and handsome and oh, so alive! I could smell his blood beneath his skin. I could hear his heart pumping in his chest.

"We should give her something for the pain, um..." The doctor looked around like there might be a bottle of morphine handy.

"No. She'll be fine," Angela suggested reasonably. "Just take out the bullet."

I sat still, as much as I could, while the man used his steel tools to dig into my shoulder. It hurt a lot, worse than anything, but I didn't scream. My tolerance for pain was a hundred times what it had been as a human. I just set my jaw, staring at that pulsing vein on the man's neck as he bent over me, working to remove a small bit of metal, dropping it on the plate.

"Is that it?" Angela asked.

"No ... It fragmented," the doctor said, going back into me for more. Deeper this time and I hissed at him, jerking violently for a brief second in Angela's arms, but then I calmed.

He found the bullet, a misshapen lump of copper that looked very big to my eyes and it landed on the plate with a heavy sound. He looked for other pieces, pulling at the wound, using a penlight and saying we should get x-rays and all of that business. At least I wasn't bleeding, but only because I didn't have enough blood in me to waste that way.

"I think I got all of it," he looked at Angela. "But you should get her to a hospital."

"It's okay. She'll live anyway. Fix her shoulder now," Angela told him and the doctor looked unhappy, but he had little choice.

He was strong mentally, and his ego was a powerful thing, as you'd expect from a physician, and so Angela's power over him was weak at best. She'd had to work hard to get him this far and her control was wearing thin. It seemed to me that his professional interest was keeping him close to us now, more than anything Angela might say to him.

"This is going to be difficult without a decent picture, an x-ray. We could..." the doctor was trying, but he knew we weren't going anywhere. Not to a hospital certainly. The police would be looking for a girl with a gunshot wound, not to mention the fact that we were vampires.

"How do we do it?" Angela interrupted him. "Just tell me, I'll help."

It wasn't very complicated, just a matter of pushing and pulling my shoulder into the right spot again. I'd heal quickly enough, in just a matter of days really. Angela wasn't worried about that so much, but more the fact that I'd heal even if my bones were crooked, and obviously I didn't want to be hunchbacked or lop-sided, or anything else. We needed to get everything where it belonged.

That involved a lot of pain, as it turned out. Surprisingly though, once my shoulder was set, most of the real pain went away. There remained only an ache, really, like a deep cramp. My shoulder throbbed as my flesh slowly but surely knitted itself back together and I sat back in Angela's arms, flushed and damp and breathing heavily as I'd wished to scream briefly in the middle of it all.

"We need to dress that wound and immobilize her arm, isolate her shoulder as much as possible." He was speaking confidently now, like a real doctor who's really in charge. Angela's control was gone, he was free of her now and yet he stayed. He was foolish in his ego and curious as all good doctors must be, I suppose. They're like gods to regular people and forget their place in the real world.

Angela was going to kill him, any second now. We'd feed on him together and wait for the man who lived here, we'd kill him too. And hide ourselves away as much as possible from the daylight when it came. Waiting for my body to heal, waiting until I could travel more easily and we could return home.

"I won't tell anyone," the doctor said softly, standing up, away from us slightly. He looked rather sad to me.

"I know," Angela whispered and she grew tense and moved so quickly then. I doubt he saw her coming until she'd taken the man as if she might a lover, in her arms and kissing his neck.

The doctor struggled briefly, fighting for his life, but he would die quickly. Angela fed on him until his heartbeat was just a rumor and then brought him to me, so that I could draw the small bit of life that remained from his limp form. His blood was rich and warm and even those few swallows that I had seemed to revitalize me somewhat, pushing the pain away completely.

I didn't tell Angela about my dream. She made a place for us to sleep during the day and I could hear her in another room, moving things, doing whatever she could to cover the windows. Dawn would be coming and we had to hope the person who stayed in this apartment would be home soon. It wouldn't do if he opened the door at noon and found the dead doctor on his kitchen floor and two vampires sleeping under his bed. Angela had a high tolerance for sunlight and I'd inherited some of that, but even healthy I wasn't strong enough to withstand a full day of it. I was injured and Angela exhausted, once we went to sleep we'd be vulnerable and nearly helpless.

And the dream was for me alone, for the moment. I remembered it now, I remembered all of it. It wasn't just a dream, it was a real memory. I remembered finally and I remembered everything. We'd crashed and my parents had died because Angela had been there. Standing in the middle of the road, for just a second, just long enough to make my dad swerve the car and hit that tree.

She'd killed them as easily as if she'd bitten them, and perhaps she had, because I didn't remember anything after that. Not until I woke up in the ambulance. So Angela might have come to the car, to the wreckage of our lives, and made sure I was an orphan. Had she done it because of me? Or in spite of me, I wondered.

I didn't understand it yet, not completely. Angela had dreamt of me, she'd said, and I tried to remember if she'd told me when her dreams had started. Had they led her to kill my parents, to make me vulnerable that way? Or had I been a surprise when she'd found me? Maybe she'd only dreamt of me after the accident, after she'd killed my parents and let me live. Like I'd haunted her.

I was too weak to think about it, too innocent perhaps to understand the way a mind as old as Angela's would work. The only thing I knew then was that she was my enemy. The murderer of my mother and father, the agent that God had sent to punish me. He was in her, I was certain of that. God lived inside Angela, evil and corrupt and He'd killed me too, turned me into this thing I was.

So I just sat there, against the refrigerator with my eyes closed and tasting the dead man's blood on my tongue. I imagined how I was going to open her up, look inside Angela and search for that cancer she carried. He couldn't hide forever and He wasn't perfect, I knew that now. He should have killed me when He'd had the chance, because I was getting stronger.

Angela would explain to me why she'd done what she had. Explain and apologize and die. All I needed to do was get healthy, get strong, and I would take her. I'd have my small revenge, if not on God, then at least on her. That seemed a good thought and it warmed me as much as the good doctor's blood.

The person who lived in that small apartment came home just before sunrise. He unlocked his door with jangling keys, huffing and puffing after climbing two flights of stairs. He was tall and overweight, carrying a bottle of something, a jug of cheap wine, and half a cigarette burned between his thick lips, the smoke making his eyes water.

He closed the door automatically, the way people do, slamming it behind him with little regard for his neighbors, and then he dropped his wine as Angela killed him. The bottle didn't break, it just rolled briefly, coming to a stop close to where I sat, watching them.

Angela fed for a few moments and then dragged him to me, leaving a thick trail of smeared blood on the floor and I had my fill of him. I'd become very tired by then, and my shoulder seemed to hurt less, but it still ached. Angela had made a sling for me and I wore it over my left shoulder, with my right arm across my tummy, but it seemed strange, almost silly that a vampire should have to be dressed like that. Bandaged and nursing her shoulder. They didn't do that in the movies.

In the movies the bullets went right through the vampires like they weren't even there. That would have been pretty nice, I thought. At least I'd gotten a good lesson in the reality of my situation. Bullets could kill, like a knife in the heart, or a long fall from a high place, or a thousand other things. I wasn't immortal or invulnerable, I was physical. I had some abilities, skills that seemed like magic that I couldn't explain, but I had weaknesses too.

Being a vampire wasn't very much like I thought it would be, but sometimes it was exactly as I might have imagined. The feeding, the drinking of blood, that was like I'd expected, but only the basic fact of it. The reality was much different. The way even a filthy man's blood warmed my body, giving my skin a healthy color and the illusion of real life. The sexual thrill that came from feeding, that was always strange. How even the smell of blood could make my nipples hard and my sex damp with anticipation.

Every time I drank blood, I craved sex, as if the two things were linked for some reason. And if I had sex, even with just Angela, I'd feel the hunger grow, like teeth gnawing at my belly. Whether I was truly hungry or not, and I rarely was, having sex filled me with the desire to kill and drink human blood.

Angela felt the same, I knew, and I thought it must be something that affected all vampires, although I had no idea why. It didn't make sense, considering we couldn't reproduce. I hadn't had a menstruation since Angela had turned me. My womb was empty, barren, and so why all the desire? But we were only nature's stepchildren, not completely of the universe, but partially something else. Something beyond the normal and so all my thoughts and speculations hardly mattered at all.

They just put me to sleep mostly, closing my eyes in the dark, feeling Angela's hand on my bare tummy. And I hadn't forgotten about her.

"The car's gone." Angela shrugged. She'd gone out after sunset, planning on coming back to get me for the long drive home.

There were roadblocks on the highways still, the local news showed state policemen stopping cars to check for the suspects in the biggest crime to hit Sacramento in forty years. A triple homicide, including two cops. They weren't going to give up the search easily or quickly, but that would have been little problem. Angela was strong again, she'd fed well and all she had to do was talk to a man, touch his hand maybe, and he'd wave us through and forget about it five minutes later.

But the car had been towed, probably. Or the cops might have gotten it. There would be nothing in it to lead them directly to us. It was the Honda, with Utah plates and registered to Nancy Parker in Salt Lake City. That would come to a dead end, which would be suspicious, but hardly helpful. If anything it should draw the cops away from who we really were and where we truly lived.

"So..." I looked at her, across the ugly guy's dead body that we'd left sprawled in his little living room.

"So, we need a new car," Angela smiled. "Maybe someone willing to give us a ride."

"Do you know someone?" I asked her.

"In this town?" Angela grinned. "Not yet. I need to find you some clothes too."

I looked down at myself. All I had on was that red vinyl skirt, spattered now with old blood. A pair of small pink panties, and some sandals. I definitely needed some clothes, and decent ones, I hoped. My shoulder was healing fast, the bullet hole was white and pink and puckered closed already, with just a little bruising still evident. But my bones, my shoulder bones, they were still weak and I couldn't move my right arm very much yet. It had only been a day though.

"I guess I have to wait here," I made a little face.

"I won't be long." Angela stepped close, kissing my forehead and stroking my good arm. "Any preference?"

"You know what I like," I gave her a little smile. "I'm hungry again."

"I know. It's your shoulder. Healing takes a lot of blood," Angela nodded. "You can probably take a bath if you want."

"Have you seen the tub?" I laughed and shook my head. "I think the guy was growing something in it."

"Well, later then. I'll be back soon." Angela kissed me again, on the lips this time and I returned it. I wasn't going to give her any reason to suspect that I knew the truth about her now.