Cross My Heart

had learnt one thing during my time in purgatory, itwas that nothing ever good happened when you opened your eyes andthat the things you did see weren’t always real.
A crinkle of plasticaccompanied the odd squeak and shuffle of clumsy feet. My visitormoved into the room, allowing the overhead lighting from the outercorridor to slither into my cell. Not as good as daylight, nowherenear, and yet being locked in the dark for such long periods oftime had made my skin super-sensitive. That horrid illumination wasall I had, all I could use to delude myself into pretending that Iwas really lay on a rock-hard stretcher in my back garden, and notsome dank room in a strange facility in God only knows where thehell I could be. The light was cold and pale, not like the warmthfrom the sun, but regardless, I could feel it on my skin, feel itsenergy in a way I couldn’t before.
Iron clamped around myjaw, breaking my momentary delusion. Not to mention the impact wasso sudden, my lids snapped open, and my eyeballs practically bulgedfrom their sockets. Jesus, talk about a wakeupcall.
The left side of myfriend’s face remained in the shadows of the room, but the right... The light barely touched him as if almost afraid to. His jawwas square, and from the patch of skin that was illuminated, he wasas pale as every other Vampire I’d had the pleasure of meetingduring my time here. His hair seemed dark, and he looked to bewearing black—the meatier fellows all seemed to wear black and havethe role of ‘the muscle’ in this joint. Clearly, they were prisonguards, and one other thing I had learnt during my stay? Theseguards didn’t have patience, not that human bouncers or securityguards rarely did, but then again, humans couldn’t go around bitingor beating the crap out of the people they were responsiblefor.
He raised his lefthand, and the red, opaque silhouette of my feeding tube caught thecorner of my eye, a droplet ready to fall from the slit. The scentof blood touched my nostrils ... Jesus ... how I hated thatI even knew that smell.
“I’m not thirsty.”
The words didn’t quitemake it past my lips. Instead, they remained locked between mythroat and teeth, but my new friend seemed to understand—this wasmade obvious by the tick in the visible side of his neck. Not thathe gave a shite, which he proved by digging his ice-cold fingertipsinto my cheeks, pushing my flesh into my teeth so violently that Iwas sure they would have shattered, but being a compromising soul,I obliged and opened my mouth. Although I doubted anyone wouldclass my mouth as being opened since my lips were vertical and thetop lip was stuck in the opposite direction of the bottom. I nodoubt looked like a fish mid-breath.
“More like a fishwith a botched lip job, mid-breath.”
I said go away,Elle. I slanted my gaze to the right corner of the room,watching as the shadows solidified.
“And I said, makeme.”
The tube was pushedbetween my teeth, the tip grazing along my tongue and pushedfarther, until it was stuck halfway down my gullet. Blood, cold andthick, coated my throat, slithering into my system. My throatflexed, more from the slight discomfort than the need to drink oreven to retch. Retching would be the right thing to do when someoneforce-fed you blood, but since I’d woken up, it was all I couldeat—well, drink. Even though my mind was still plagued with disgustand the madness of the situation, a part of me had accepted theinevitable and ridiculous truth ... I was a Vampire.
Then again, my captorshad drilled this life-changing fact into me repeatedly since themoment I had first woken up and had refused to believe, refused todrink, which they had loved. Tormenting was apparently no fun ifyour victim was accepting of their situation. It had been somewhathard, not to mention physically painful, to digest, especiallysince I couldn’t recall a flash of fangs or being filled withterror as one of the undead pounced from the shadows in order tofeed from me. Nor could I remember being fed blood or the agony ofdeath or waking up reborn—all of which was supposed to take placeaccording to Elle.
“So maybe I lied.Maybe I was wrong.”
My focus stayed fixedon that corner of the room, to her form which became more solidwith each second. You would never admit you were wrong.
“Maybe not when wewere kids, but maybe now, I would admit such a thing, especiallysince a Vampire didn’t feed off you and baptize you with its blood.That certainly didn’t happen t’you, did it?”
No, all I couldremember was rain ... A dark street, Freddie singing the SpiceGirls, ‘If you wanna be my lover’ severely off-key beside me as westumbled back to the hostel in London. Being knocked to the ground;blood trickling into my eyes ... Freddie on the floor next to me,someone in black pining him down. Darkness followed by flashes oflight and faces; being naked and so freaking cold. The glint ofneedle tips and ... fuck ... the pain; slices into my ballsack, and then my heart, hammering so quickly and so damn hard, asif it were about to explode out of my chest or just give up on mealtogether ... and then a whole lot of nothing before I woke up inthis dark, dank room.
The Hollywood take onbeing turned into a creature of the night hadn’t happened, andsure, I had always though Elle had been crazy, obsessed withVampires, but in a cute, supernatural fanatic kind of way since shewent into fascinating details which were so elaborate, it wasalways like being told a scary story. I had always believed heroveractive imagination to be just that—while we played in thefields and forests near our hometown, she wished we were roamingthrough a more dangerous and thrilling world. A world she had beeninvested in since we were eight, a world I humoured her withbecause she was my best friend and had enough crazy stuff going onat home, but ...
“Vampires exist,Than. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in them. Lack ofbelief doesn’t make them any less real.” She