Myths and royalties and godfathers.

Last weekend, I headed down to Vargrave's with Julie, Paul, Michael and a couple of other friends. During Solz's second set, I managed to corner Paul and told him about what I had found out about Kristy Helleughes.
"A werewolf, huh?" he mused. "No wonder she's always in such a bitchy mood."
I frowned at him. "She's had a really hard time of it, what with the deaths of her friends and being responsible for her family's deaths."
"Yeah, I guess I'd be a bitch too if that had happened to me." Paul took a sip of his beer. "So, you fought with a werewolf. Are you okay? No serious injuries?"
I nodded dismissively. "I'm fine. But have you ever met any werewolves before? I never knew they existed."
"Oh, yeah, I've heard of them," Paul said. "Vampires and werewolves don't mix much, you know. I've met a few. They tend to stick to their own cliques, otherwise they're loners, like Kristy. I hear they've got their own royalty. Like, werewolf lords or something. Kind of like the Godfather of the mafia."
"A werewolf godfather? Are you kidding me?" I suddenly had visions of Marlon Brando at an Italian restaurant with a huge juicy raw steak in front of him and a long bushy tail sprouting from the back of his seat, looking kind of like the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood. Then a thought occured to me. "Do we have any vampire godfathers?" I asked curiously.
Paul shook his head. "Not that I know of." He frowned. "There have been rumors, though. Of a vampire king and a vampire queen. Supposedly they're the oldest living vampires in the world."
"Sort of like an Anne Rice Queen of the Damned type?" I gave him a doubtful look. It sounded too freaky and bad-fiction-like to be true.
He shrugged. "Those are what the rumors say. But I don't think most vampires believe that. It's just a rumor."
I sighed. The real vampire world was cloaked in myths and rumors, just like its fiction counterparts. What bullshit this was. Couldn't someone just bring everyone together and create, like, a proper vampire government with registered vampires and stuff like that or something? It would make things easier for a new vampire like me to find out about stuff.
Paul patted my hand. "There's never been any sign of them before, anyway, so I think it hardly matters whether they do exist or not."
I nodded, swirling the ice in my whiskey-and-coke. "So, anyway," I said. "Back to Kristy. She says she's never met any werewolves in her life - I mean, besides the ones that changed her. Do you know if there's any of them around town?"
Paul frowned. "I saw a couple of them before, months ago. On the streets. But that's all." He shrugged. "Like I said, they prefer to keep to themselves. They're an odd lot, they are."
"Yeah," I said. "I guess they are. Like vampires, really." I grinned at Paul.
He laughed, then we fell silent as one of the bar guys comes by and clears our table of empty glasses.
When he left, I turned to Paul. "So werewolves exist. Who else does? Witches? Elves?"
"I've heard of witches before, but I've never met one," Paul said. "Apparently you don't want to get on the bad side of a witch. I've never heard of elves existing." He laughed. "Maybe you'd want to run over to Ireland and check it out."
I sipped my drink. Paul was making a silly drunk joke but the idea actually had a sort of appeal to me. Traveling the world, discovering new creatures that I never knew truly existed before, meeting them, talking to them, finding out about them. It was like being an explorer from the old British Empire days or something.
"It's so freaky," I mused, "becoming a vampire and then discovering this whole new world - that vampires exist, and then now discovering werewolves exist too, and even witches, and who knows what else..." I glanced at Paul. "Aren't you curious to know more?"
He shrugged. "I've been around quite a bit in my time. Guess you could say I've become a bit jaded. Me, I prefer to keep to myself. Don't go looking for trouble and trouble won't find you."
I snorted. "I've tried that, and believe me, Paul, trouble always finds me, whether I go looking for it or not." I shrugged, took a gulp of my drink.
Paul looked at me over the top of his beer. "Well, I guess it makes life more interesting for you."
I laughed. "Oh, yeah, it does." I finished my drink and set down the glass, stood up. "Come on, let's go join the others before my boyfriend starts getting weird ideas about you and me again."

Guilty Secrets and dinner

Tonight I had dinner with Michael. It was so good to see him, I cannot tell you. I hadn't seen him in almost a week and a half because we've both been so busy with college and stuff. And it felt like we hadn't seen each other in years. Well, at least it felt like that to me, what with everything going on and that whole thing with Kristy, so much has happened.
And you know what really sucked? It would be so nice to be able to tell Michael what's been going on, to get his opinion of it, to just have him listen to me and talk it over with me. But I can't. This really sucks. Sometimes I just feel so guilty over the fact that I have to hide this big secret from him.
And he knows. Over our pasta carbonara, he suddenly asked me, "Are you sure everything's all right?"
"Yeah, everything's fine," I answered. "Just a lot of work, you know...my mind's all on college and classes and papers and reports right now." I laughed. "Not very exciting stuff, but that's college for you."
He reached over and took my hand. "You sure there's nothing else that's bothering you?"
"No...not at all," I said quickly. "What makes you think that?"
He shrugged. "Just... I don't know. You seem a little more distracted than usual. I'm just concerned about you." He shrugged again and smiled at me. "Don't mind me. I'm just happy to see you again after so long. I want to see you happy."
I smiled back at him. "I am happy, Michael." Shit, do I feel guilty right now! "And, you know, as I told you, my relationship with Kristy Helleughes seems to be improving, so all is really good right now."
He smiled again. "I'm glad to know that. Even though she does seem like such a weird chick. That's great, Agatha."
I shrugged. "Yeah, well, one enemy less is one friend more. Or something like that." I laughed. "So how about you? How's that big economics project of yours going? What did the prof say today?"
I wish I could be as open with Michael as he is with me. He tells me... everything. Sometimes I wonder...should I just tell him that I'm a vampire? Sometimes I just really, really want to spill my secret. But something always holds me back. I'm not sure what. I think I'm just afraid he might not love me when he finds out I'm a vampire. That he might think me a freak, something inhumane, like what Kristy thought of me. That he wouldn't love me anymore. I worry that Julie and Solz might freak out too. But I worry more about what Michael might think.
Jeez. It's difficult being a vampire after all.

Talking.

It was a pretty good thing that Kristy and I had our report to work on. Otherwise, meeting up again would have been one awkward situation and we wouldn't know what to say to each other.
As it is, when we first met up in class, we barely said a word to one another, and just handed up our draft and agreed to meet up in the library the next day to finally finish up that lousy report. In the library, our initial conversation consisted mostly of this:
Me: "Um... I think this should go on page six."
Kristy: "Yeah? You think so?"
Me: "Yeah. If that's okay with you."
Kristy: "Yeah, it's okay with me. If it's okay with you."
Me: "Okay, I'm putting it on page six."
Kristy: "Yeah. Okay. Cool."

Or:

Kristy: "I'll do the bibliography now. If that's fine with you."
Me: "Yeah, sure. If you want to do it."
Kristy: "Yeah, I'll do it. Unless you want to do it."
Me: "Yeah, I'm fine with it."
Kristy: "Okay."

Jeez, it was like, awkward, awkward, awkward.

Anyway, when we finally quit for a break, I just glanced over at her. And I just had to say something. So I said: "So are you feeling any better? I mean after that night? I mean, after our fight and all?"
She glanced over at me quickly. "Yeah, yeah I am," she said. "Werewolves heal fast." Her eyes flickered up and down me. "You heal fast too."
I shrugged. "Yeah. Apparently the myths about being killed only by wood are true." I looked at her curiously. "How about you?"
She shrugged. "I have no idea, to tell you the truth."
"What do you mean?" i asked curiously. "You don't know?"
She shrugged. "I mean I don't know. My story's not too different from yours. I was on a camping trip with some friends a few years ago. In a national park. We were hiking."
"Hiking. Jeez," I said. "Sorry. Go on."
"Some wolves - Some wolves - well, they were werewolves but I didn't know that, then - came along one night - the night of the full moon - and attacked us while we were asleep."
I thought about the moon that night that Kristy and I had our memorable fight. There had been a full moon too. So that story was true too!
"I woke up to the sound of my friends screaming," Kristy went on. There were a lot of dark shapes. I thought they were cougars or panthers or something. Something jumped on me, something with red eyes, and it attacked me and I fought back. For some reason, it didn't kill me. I passed out from the pain, and when I came to, I found myself lying in a pile of blood in the middle of the campsite. My friends were all dead and the park rangers had found us. They got me on an ambulance to the hospital, but for some reason, I was barely wounded. Just a bunch of scratches. Strange, because there had been so much blood around me. And I was in a shitload of pain and feeling totally nauseated. But somehow, I was okay. I wasn't seriously injured.
"They released me from the hospital on the second day. There was an inquiry into it. It was wolves that had attacked our campsite, they said. I was lucky to have survived." She let out a hollow laugh. "Lucky. I should have died. I wonder why they didn't kill me."
"Who knows why vampires and werewolves do these things?" I agreed. "It seems more of a random hit and run kind of thing. Bloody hell. We newbies should have a demonstration or a protest or something against that. We want guidelines. We want mentors. Or something."
Kristy cast me a doubtful look. "Anyway, I thought nothing else about it. I had some really bad nightmares, but we put it down to the trauma. I started seeing a counselor at school. Everyone was reassuring me that it wasn't my fault that I had survived and my friends hadn't. That I was lucky." She grimaced. "And then, exactly one month later, it was the full moon. I was feeling sick most of that day. I stayed home from school. And then, I changed." She looked away, her blonde hair falling over her face to hide it. "I tore down the door of my bedroom. The first person I saw was my mother. I remembered thinking that's my mother, what am I doing? but I couldn't stop myself. I killed her, then I killed my dad and my brother too." She buried her face in her hands. "Then I ran out of the house and into the streets. I was terrified and didn't know what had happened to me. It wasn't until dawn that I changed back into myself. I was miles away from home. I stole some clothes and ran home. I saw what I had done, that it was real. I was scared, horrified. I packed some things and took off. I left town."
She glanced away. "I had some savings from a part-time job, I took that and I went away. I just drifted for a few months. I met some other drifters, and I heard about this guy who would get you a new ID and new papers, no questions asked, everything stays confidential, as long as you deliver the cash upfront. I spent most of my savings to get the papers done. Then I took off to another town, got a job, started working. I've been changing towns every few months, until I moved here. It's been a few years, I had some cash saved up, I wanted to start afresh. I wanted a change, a routine life. Well, as routine a life as I can ever get. That's why I started college here." She shrugged. "Work and college, it seemed easy enough to handle. As long as I didn't get close to anyone, I figured my secret was safe. I only turn into a werewolf every full moon. By now, I had managed to control myself during my, um, werewolf stage. I didn't kill anyone anymore. Before that, I locked myself in my room. But soon, I managed to understand better what I was, managed to control myself." She heaved a sigh, a sigh of fatigue and regret. "I only wish I had learnt that control right away. Before I killed my family."
"That wasn't your fault, Kristy," I said gently. "You didn't understand, you didn't even know. If it was anyone's fault that you killed your family, it was whoever that was who first turned you into a werewolf. They had no right. It wasn't your fault."
She shook her head. "Don't you know how many times I've told myself that over and over again? But I can't really bring myself to believe it. So many ifs."
"Oh, Kristy," I said. "That's bullshit. You know you're not responsibly for your family's death."
She looked at me, then laughed. "Somehow, your bluntness makes me feel better," she said dryly. "Thanks. I guess."
"You're welcome. I guess." I sat back and looked at her. "So you're a werewolf," I said. "And I'm a vampire. First I find out that vampires exist. Then I find out werewolves do too. Huh. Who would have thought that? What next? Witches?"
Kristy shrugged. "You never know."
I thought about it. "So all this while, you've never met another werewolf or even a vampire?" I asked.
Kristy frowned, thinking. "No," she said at last. "I think I would have sensed it. I could sense that you were something. Not a werewolf, I knew, but something else. I have sensed it in some other people too, you know, people on the streets, or in a restaurant or something. That they were vampires, or something. But I usually try to avoid them. But you, I couldn't avoid. I saw you in class every week."
"It's so nice to know I really make your week," I said dryly. "So that means there are a lot more vampires than there are werewolves. Either that, or the 'wolves are all in hiding somewhere."
"Yeah," Kristy said. She frowned. "You know, that's really odd."
"Uh-huh. Tell me about it." I twirled my pencil, almost dropped it. I could never really twirl a pencil right. "So tell me," I said. "What's true about werewolf myths? Do you only change during a full moon or what?"
"No," Kristy said. "I can change any other time if I want to. I've tried it. But I don't usually do it. And I have to change during a full moon. No choice. Mandatory rule there."
"They should use you as a calendar in an observatory centre," I joked.
She gave me a startled look, then laughed. "You're really crazy, you know that?" she said.
"So everyone tells me," I said dismissively.
She laughed again. "Now it's your turn," she said. "Tell me how you became a vampire. You said the other night that you only recently became one."
So I told her. I told her all about how I became a vampire, all the stuff I went through, about the other vampires I've met, like Paul and Peter, and about the time I almost killed that high school kid, and so on. I think it was really good for Kristy to actually tell someone what's been going on, after the past few years of keeping it all in. She was way more relaxed after that. We made some vampire-werewolf jokes. Really bad ones. We didn't get much work done, though, but who cares. We're both immortal. At least, we think we are. We don't really know, see, since both our makers didn't bother to let us in on the secret. But we have a lot more time than your average human, so we'll get that report done later.