Chapter Text
The last thing Megan remembers is clinking her glass with Lara’s.
“Here’s to first semester of junior year,” Megan had said, laughing, already several drinks in and the room around them starting to pleasantly tilt.
“Thank fuck we never have to do that again,” Lara had replied, and they both dissolved into giggles, taking long drinks of vodka sodas that random guys at the bar had paid for for them.
“Hey, it’s only up from here, three more semesters to go!”
The concrete is cold and rough against Megan’s cheek. She flexes her hand against the ground and feels every groove and irregularity. The cold of December seeps beneath her skin and into her insides, and when she brings her hands closer to her chest, it does nothing to make her feel warmer. Around her smells like rot and piss and garbage, but above it all, there is something sweet that makes her stomach clench and her mouth water.
And oh God, her throat burns like someone dropped a struck match down her esophagus. She tries to swallow, to coat her throat in saliva in an attempt to extinguish the burning sensation, but she just whimpers at the feeling.
Megan sits up too fast, her body moving at a speed she is not used to as she smacks her head back into the brick wall behind her. It doesn’t hurt the way it should. The way she imagines, she knows smacking your head against a wall feels.
“The fuck,” she whispers out, and the words physically hurt when they crawl out. The panic that has been building in her system reaches an apex, and she wants to claw her way out of her own body because every sensation is suddenly too much.
She swipes her tongue along her lips and tastes blood crusted there. The taste of it makes the fire in her throat burn hotter. She wants to throw up. She wants to scream. She wants to understand whatever the hell is happening. But mostly, she wants everything to stop hurting so much.
And the sounds. There are heartbeats. Dozens. Hundreds. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. They ring throughout her skull, and even though she brings her hands up and presses down on her ears, she still hears them. It reminds her of when she and Lara went to Coachella, and the speakers were too close, and the sound buzzed in her chest instead of her head. Except this is so much worse because she can’t just walk away from the noise.
“Make it stop,” she cries through the pain. “Please make it stop, make it stop, make it stop—”
Click. Click. Click.
The moment Megan registers the sound as heels on pavement, the sound ticks up in frequency, striking down harder on the concrete.
Click-click-click-click-click.
“Oh my god,” the voice above her is breathless.
Megan blinks open her eyes; tears cling to her bottom lashes. She stares at the shiny, black boots that come to a sharp point at the toe before she drags her gaze up. A long black woolen coat falls past just below where her knee-high boots end. Dark hair spills over her shoulders in waves, and sunglasses cover her gaze even though Megan can see her eyebrows reaching above the frame, scrunched in concern.
“Oh god — Hey, hey.” The woman’s voice is high, peaking with concern. “I know it hurts. How long have you been awake?” She drops down into a crouch in front of Megan; the smell of lavender and vanilla cuts through the stench of rot.
When Megan opens her mouth to speak this time, it feels as though the sound is being physically restrained in her throat. Megan tries, nonetheless, but the sound that comes out is nothing close to a word, more like the sound of a wounded animal.
The woman watches her steadily with a patience that should feel soothing, but makes unease build in Megan’s chest. The woman is far too calm for this situation — she hasn’t stirred or flinched. Something tells Megan to run.
“I can help you, but you have to trust me,” the woman says, using the same tone one would use to talk to a stray cat, trying to coax it close without scaring it away. “Can you do that?”
Megan stares at her for a long moment before she inclines her head down slightly.
The corner of the woman’s mouth twitches up, and she reaches into her right coat pocket. When the hand comes back out, she’s holding a blood bag with a big “AB” on its label. It reminds Megan of when she and Lara went to donate blood, except Megan got too nervous and her heart raced too fast, so they wouldn’t let her.
Then the woman takes a sharp red nail and punctures it.
The smell of copper erupts in the air, and Megan’s mouth waters. The burning in her throat reaches an unbearable point. Her hands shake, and she feels her thoughts beginning to coalesce into one desperate desire to make this feeling go away.
The woman holds the bag out toward her, arm relaxed, like she’s offering her a juice box.
“Go on,” she urges.
Megan lunges.
She pushes off against the brick and surges forward, snatching the bag from the woman and hunkering down onto the ground right next to her.
The entire world narrows down into one tiny point. This tiny gap that the nail created isn’t enough, and so she tears into the plastic with newfound fangs that feel too large for her mouth. Blood spills everywhere, onto her chin, her hands, her clothes. The concrete below is littered with splatters of deep red. She doesn’t care; she drinks desperately, sloppily. The burning in her throat sizzles down into dull little sparks. She sucks the bag until it's dry and licks the blood from her fingers, desperate for every drop to make this burning stop. Stop. It needs to stop.
Megan drops the empty bag to the ground.
She looks at her hands, caked in dried blood. Some old, beneath her nails from days before. She doesn’t know when or how it got there. Her jeans are torn at the knees. And blood, the blood, it’s everywhere. Megan’s whole body trembles. The burning is already beginning to spark back in her throat again, getting worse with every second that passes. And all she wants is to make it all stop again.
Megan swallows a sob.
“Look at me,” the woman says softly. She removes her sunglasses with her free hand, and Megan sees brown eyes with pupils blown so wide they eclipse her iris. “Just focus on me. You’re going to be okay.”
“What—” Megan’s voice comes out scratchy. “What's happening to me?”
The woman stares at her for a long moment, purses her lips, then reaches forward and swipes some of the blood away from Megan’s chin.
“You probably figured it out already, but you’re a vampire,” she says. The words sound so normal coming off her lips, like she’s telling Megan the weather.
The word vampire ricochets in Megan’s brain, and she can’t wrap her mind around it. Vampires are for Halloween costumes and movies, and classic novels you read the SparkNotes of.
“No, I can’t — I have to go home in two days. My flight — I have — Lara was with me. We were—” A million thoughts fly through her head, and she tries desperately to catch onto one thread. “We were at a bar. We were just celebrating. We were just drinking and laughing and—” She freezes. “I don’t remember leaving. I don’t remember anything after… Did I hurt her? Oh god, did I—”
“You didn’t,” The woman whispers. “If you had, you would remember. Something like that… it sticks with you.”
Megan scoffs. “And how would you know that?”
The woman’s expression softens. "Because I'm like you," she says gently. “My name is Sophia, and I don’t want you to go through this alone.”
Her dark eyes sweep over Megan’s face. Then, after a moment of hesitation, she shrugs off her coat and drapes it over Megan’s shoulders. The fabric is heavy and soft and smells like her: vanilla and lavender. Megan pulls it a little tighter around herself and breathes it in.
“Can I ask your name?” Sophia asks.
“Megan. I’m —” The knee-jerk reaction of a first day of classes icebreaker doesn’t feel suited for this moment: junior, studying psych and fashion, from Honolulu — is she even a college student anymore? Megan looks down at the empty plastic blood bag she had torn into like a rabid beast.
“Hey, hey.” Sophia’s hands reach up to cup Megan's face fully now, both palms against her cheeks, forcing Megan to look at her. Megan can’t look away. “It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me anything. I know this is scary. But we’ll figure it out.”
“We?”
Sophia smiles, and her upper lip pulls back, revealing two perfect white fangs.
“Yes, we.”
Megan swallows, the burning sensation in her throat beginning to climb again. Faintly, in the back of her head, she knows she should question how Sophia can say such a thing with that level of certainty. She should be asking the million questions beginning to pop up in her head. But the burning is beginning to start again, a slow crawl up her throat, and it clouds every thought.
“I’m…” Megan digs her nails into her jeans. “It still hurts.”
“I can make a call, get you more?” Sophia offers.
“More blood?” Megan whispers, voice cracked.
Sophia nods, and the confirmation makes fresh tears spill out of Megan’s eyes and run down her cheeks. A sob tears from her throat before she can stop it, and she can’t help but collapse forward into Sophia’s arms. Sophia doesn’t even hesitate; she wraps her hands around Megan and brings her in close.
“I’ve got you, you’re going to be okay,” Sophia murmurs, muffled by Megan’s hair. “I’ll take care of you.”
“I want to go home,” Megan chokes out. Megan buries her face deeper into Sophia’s shoulder and lets herself cry. She clutches at Sophia’s sweater, a cashmere wool, she thinks, probably ruined now with snot and blood.
Sophia doesn’t say anything at first; she just hums gently.
“I know,” Sophia says in a whisper.
“I can’t go home, though, can I?” Megan says weakly.
Sophia pulls back at that, her thumb giving another swipe over Megan’s cheekbone. The loss of close contact makes Megan want to reach out and tug Sophia back in. (She can’t help but wonder if Sophia’s arms are the only arms she will ever be able to bury herself in again.)
“You could go home,” Sophia says carefully. “It would be hard, but I wouldn’t stop you.”
“Hard?”
Sophia thinks for a moment before responding. “All the people, all the sounds… it would be hard to hide what you are from people you know so well, right?”
Megan nods, slow. “You’re right, I think… but it’s been a while I don’t — what day is it?”
“Monday,” Sophia answers automatically.
That’s not right. It should be Saturday. Megan went out with Lara on Friday night. They pregamed in their stupid, cramped dorm, and Lara let Megan pick out her outfit for her while they pregamed with shooters they had collected (stolen) over the course of the semester. They had made it to the bar around eleven.
Which means there are three days of just… nothing. A whole weekend (her favorite part of the week) that Megan lived without knowing it.
“How is that possible?” Megan laughs because it all just feels so absurd. This is a bad dream, a Sunday-scaries-fever-dream that her alarm is going to jerk her awake from any second now. “That’s, that's three days. I don’t—”
Megan presses her hands to her face and feels the dried blood flake off from her cheeks onto her hands.
“Did I hurt people?” She forces the question out.
“I don’t know,” Sophia admits.
“I can't just — you can’t just not know,” Megan laughs. “I mean… do you remember when you turned?”
Sophia looks a little affronted at the accusation, and she turns the other way with her jaw clenched. “It’s been a while… I don’t remember much of anything from that time.”
“How long is a while?” Megan pushes. “There’s no way you just forget, right?”
Sophia’s quiet for a moment, and she captures her bottom lip with her teeth before she speaks. “I was turned in the 1500s, if that answers your question.”
Megan can only stare for a moment. Holy shit, she’s five hundred years old. The woman in front of her, who looks maybe twenty years old, has lived twenty-five of Megan’s lifetimes over.
“That’s five hundred years,” she echoes.
“Give or take,” Sophia supplies.
Megan shakes her head. “That’s so long. That’s so fucking long ago. How do you even—” She stops. “So you don’t remember anything? From before?”
“From being a human? Some things, the details… they’re blurry. I sometimes forget what’s a memory and what’s a dream when I wake up,” Sophia says, her gaze distant.
“I don’t want to forget,” Megan whispers. The idea of watching her friends, her family grow old, die, and then forget what they even looked like makes her nauseous.
“I know that’s a lot to take in,” Sophia says. She reaches forward once more to place her hand on Megan’s knee, giving it a little squeeze. “It might help having somewhere neutral to adjust… do you want to come home with me?”
Megan blinks. The phrasing of it, despite everything, makes Megan giggle. It’s what someone says to you at one in the morning at the bar, not what you hear after waking up a vampire in a garbage-covered alleyway.
Sophia’s head tilts slightly. She opens her mouth to say something, but Megan shakes her head.
“Sorry,” Megan says, and hysteria feels weirdly welcome amid her spiral. “It’s just the way you said it. It sounded like a pickup line.”
Sophia smiles, still a little confused, “I suppose it does.”
Her smile is a toothy one, and her fangs peek just over her bottom lip. The fangs should make Megan recoil, but Sophia looks… kind of adorable. Her eyes are scrunched at the corners, and her nose is wrinkled up — it makes Megan forget for a moment that Sophia is, actually, a dangerous five-hundred-year-old vampire.
“Okay, okay,” Sophia says, the smile relaxing as Megan’s laughter fades. “But … do you want to?”
“Yeah,” Megan says, “I think… I think it would be good.”
Sophia nods and pulls out her phone.
“I’ll call a car, it can be here in… ten minutes?” She glances up, taking account of Megan’s reaction. “Can you wait that long?”
Megan nods.
The car is a Mercedes, because of course it is.
The driver doesn’t even spare a second glance at Megan, though even Megan does a double-take at herself. She catches her reflection in the window: the lower half of her face and shirt drenched in blood, her skin pale and smooth, and when she snarls her lip experimentally, she sees her canines have elongated into fangs.
“I thought vampires didn’t have reflections,” she mumbles, mostly to herself, as she slides into the car.
“My house, please,” Sophia says to the driver, and then slides the partition between the back and front seats shut.
“I would’ve taken you for a Twilight girl,” Sophia muses, turning to Megan.
The Twilight universe seems far removed from reality, Sophia’s skin doesn’t sparkle, the world isn’t cast in a cool-toned filter, but hey, at least they got the vampires having a reflection thing right.
“Nor really. Me and my roommate did a marathon freshman year. We mostly just laughed at it,” Megan says, shaking her head. The memory makes her smile to herself, and when she looks up, she sees Sophia smiling at her. “Have you seen Twilight?” she can’t help but ask.
“I read the books, I’ll have to get educated on the films, though,” Sophia says.
Megan’s lip quirks up. “I don’t know if they’ll be very educational for you; they were kind of wrong about a lot of things,” she says.
Sophia shrugs, “I can fact-check.”
Megan lets her head fall back onto the leather seats and watches the city begin to slide by through the tinted window. Her vision’s better now, she realizes. The world’s in high definition, and instead of feeling happy that she has 20/20 vision again, she just feels overwhelmed.
It’s all too much.
She turns back to Sophia, who is looking out the window herself. She’s perfectly still and her expression is distant. An impulsive thought pushes its way to the forefront of her brain: She’s really pretty. Which is exactly what she should not be thinking about right now, and yet there’s something almost hypnotic about Sophia that raises a thousand questions.
Megan can’t help but wonder how long Sophia has been here. How long has she watched this city grow, watched cities rise then fall, watched people grow up and then leave or die?
The thought of her having to do the same terrifies her.
Sophia turns, and, well, Megan has never been good at tamping down her expressions.
“Are you okay?” Sophia asks.
No, she’s not okay. She’s dead. She lived a weekend that she doesn’t remember, and she probably killed some people on the way that she has absolutely no idea about.
She swallows.
“I’m just… really tired,” she settles on.
Sophia searches her eyes, and Megan vaguely wonders if vampires can read minds. Can you read minds? She asks in her head, but Sophia doesn’t react. Guess they don’t.
“Do you want to get some sleep?” Sophia asks. “Traffic’s pretty bad, it might be a bit until we get to where I stay.”
Megan suddenly feels hyperaware of how exhaustion has crept its way into her bones, overpowering the burning in her throat that has dulled to a tickle. (And the idea of just closing her eyes and pretending none of this is happening is incredibly alluring.)
Megan scoffs, “I guess I have an eternity to sleep now, huh?”
Something crosses Sophia’s face, pity perhaps. Then Sophia brushes her hair off her shoulder that is closest to Megan, and pats it in invitation.
“No, no, it’s fine,” Megan says automatically before Sophia can elaborate on the offer.
But Sophia scooches to be close enough that their thighs are touching. “I insist, come here.” She lifts her arm, and Megan gives in, letting herself fall sideways into Sophia’s embrace.
It’s weird not hearing someone’s heartbeat in their chest.
“Get some sleep,” Sophia whispers into Megan’s hair, her hands come up to comb their way through the knots.
Then Megan feels Sophia’s head bow down, and her lips gently place a kiss on the top of her head. It’s barely above a whisper, but Megan is pretty sure she heard Sophia say something. Something that sounded like I’m so sorry.
‘’S not your fault,” Megan mumbles into her sweater, just in case, and she lets her eyes flutter shut.
She can’t help but hope when she opens her eyes, she’ll be back in her cramped dorm room with her head pounding from a hangover, Lara snoring from the twin XL three feet away. She hopes her mom will have asked her how she plans on getting to the airport.
For now, she just keeps her eyes closed.