You Wanna

“If you don’t find your preying spirit, then I will turn this cloud around young vampiress!” Victorina screeched at her newest daughter while flying at the front of their bat colony.

“It’s too dark,” Prella whined. “I promise I’ll do better when the sun comes up.”

Victorina flapped her wings forward to slow herself down and hovered in front of her youngest. “You know why we cannot hunt during the day. Besides, you won’t make it to morning if you don’t feed soon.”

Her mother’s last point made Prella tremble and lose height. She was right. Prella had managed to escape the last two night’s of hunting by hiding in a barn, but they took a different route tonight. If it hadn’t been the third night, then she may have believed her mother would turn them around and back to the cave, but she wouldn’t risk the life of any of her children.

Going out on the town was still a dangerous endeavor. Witch hunts had been started over someone seeing the simple transformation of bat to human. The few people that had lived to share their story, of seeing a human turn into a vampire, had led to war or a life sentence in an asylum.

Victorina didn’t allow misbehaving vampires out on hunts. Prella was different though. She wasn’t disobedient or mischievous, merely frightened of the new world vampirism brought.

“Let’s descend!” Victorina commanded to the dark cloud of vampire bats she had sired over the past dozen decades.

Like the conditioned group of predators they were, they sank gracefully towards the ground in unison. Where most bats would fly up at the sight of the approaching asphalt, Victorina’s colony pulled their leathery wings up and landed softly on their human feet.

Prella watched her vampire siblings walk across the half-filled parking lot towards the dim-lit club. They moved with confidence and an air of superiority. She was the youngest in both vampire and human years; her innocence preserved on her face for eternity.

“It’s time, Prella,” Victorina said gently. She had stayed back with Prella, watching the rest of her children start their night-long stalk.

“The clubs are dark,” Prella said, standing in the glow of the streetlight.

“We’ve talked about this,” her mother said, annoyance seeping into her voice. “The dark protects us. And if you don’t drink human blood soon, you will not see the next sun rise.”

Prella watched the other vampires disappear through different doors. She could feel her need for blood prick at her nerve endings. The more she thought about it, the more dehydrated she felt, as if her skin was sticking to her bones.

“Will you do it for me?” Prella implored, looking up at the long-legged and elegant vampire that took her under the wing a month ago. “Like you did last time?”

“Prella,” Victorina snapped and started walking, though it looked more like gliding to Prella. “That was a teaching moment. When you feel yourself truly starving, and you will, then you will be overcome with the feeding instinct.”

“But,” Prella interjected then felt a rise of nausea as anxiety overwhelmed her.

Victorina stopped and turned to look down at her failing protégé. “Remember, you chose this.”

Prella followed Victorina to the door of the club. She stared at the lights hung up over the entrance and tried to suck some sort of strength from them. Victorina’s cold hand closed on her wrist and pulled her into the club behind her. The door shut with a jarring clang that made Prella want to transform and cling in a corner.

When she had chosen vampirism, she had been under the impression she was choosing a better life in a glamorous, parallel universe. That is what they had made it sound like. The colony had told her about their life of luxury and how they could do whatever they liked and have whatever they wanted with no more effort than lifting a finger. That was all true, but they hadn’t told her the real price; the frequent necessity of fresh, human blood.

“What are you having miss?” the well-dressed bartender shouted over the din to Prella as he handed Victorina a long-stemmed glass. The cloudy liquid was at the brim but didn’t spill over, even with the two olives on a stick swirling around.

“Cosmo,” Prella answered back automatically. On her first, and only, hunting trip, her vampire sisters told her how important it was to have a favorite drink. They had explained the pros and cons for each type, though she only recalled the main points: beer makes you bloated, red wine stains your lips, tequila steals your conscience and anything that comes with instructions is a waste of everyone’s time.

“Good luck hunting, child,” Victorina raised her glass and nodded at Prella. “You have a few hours.”

Prella watched Victorina spin on her chair to lean over the bar and flirt with her potential next victim.

The club seemed to be darker, now that Prella was on her own. She was unsure if Victorina would really save her at the last hour when her heart stopped beating from depletion of blood.

The music was loud and reverberated through Prella’s body. She wondered if everyone heard sound as well as she did, or if it was a vampire characteristic. It hadn’t been long since she had been a breathing human being, but her memories of her previous life had quickly faded. She was almost sure she couldn’t hear the heart beats of people in other rooms when she was human, but she was no longer positive. The uncertainty of her new life scared her.

Someone bumped into her, making her jump. Their mumbled apology became lost in the growing thunder of sound around her. It felt like she was in an instrument that created and echoed endless waves of vibrations. The hairs on her arms were moving rhythmically.

The club was becoming more and more crowded. Prella couldn’t see past the person in front of her. Everyone was taller by at least a few inches. The pumping of blood became intoxicating and Prella started dancing with her hands up in the air, letting people weave around her as the center of attention. She needed to release her anxiety and find that instinct Victorina was talking about.

“You wanna dance?” A handsome stranger grabbed Prella’s hand as he asked.

This was her invitation. “Sure.”

The man’s hands went around Prella’s waist and he moved their bodies to the beat of the music. All she could focus on was the pulsing at his throat, just under a strong jawline and 5 o’clock shadow. As a human, Prella would have been too scared to be on the dance floor with a group of friends, let alone a man she didn’t know.

This was different. Prella felt no fear about dancing now. All the society-related fears of life that had pushed her into choosing her new one were irrelevant now. Vampirism was supposed to rid her of her fears, but it merely changed the focus of them.

“You wanna step outside?” The man asked in Prella’s ear.

If her heart had still been tied with emotion, it would have skipped a beat.

“Okay,” Prella said, holding her courage in her throat and letting the guy lead her out a door that opened to a patio.

They were the only people outside. A lantern hung from a pole in the far corner, attracting a cluster of moths and a single bat that swooped after them. Prella wondered if it was one of her colony, keeping up the façade to spy on her.

The man kissed her neck, filling her nostrils with his cologne. The fragrance was overbearing, like he had sprayed more than required specifically to repel vampires. Prella could feel herself weakening. The fatigue of starvation was setting in.

It would take strength to sink her teeth into his neck, and more strength to keep him from pushing her off. Once her fangs were deep enough, they would inject a paralysis toxin.

The man’s hands were on her again. She could sense that he was wanting more, his body was begging for it. He seemed to take her trepidation as a challenge. If they had been in a park on a sunny Saturday, then she would have no reserves on sucking him dry.

“You okay?” the man asked. “You’re trembling.”

Prella felt her body shaking like the last leaf on a tree before the wind rips it away. It wasn’t the cold, but her quickly deteriorating autonomic nervous system. The man’s body enveloped her, blocking her vision from the last particles of light.

The darkness consumed Prella and threw her mind into a fight or flight frenzy. She grabbed the man’s shirt from the back with one hand and ran the other up the front of his chest, pushing him away slowly so she could see that rhythmic thumping in his neck.

“You wanna go back inside?” The man hesitated, “Maybe a drink will warm you up.”

“I think you’re right,” Prella gasped. She climbed her fingers up the man’s neck and into his short, gelled hair, panting with hunger.

After seeing a spark of excitement in the man’s eyes, Prella pulled his head to her shoulder. It was effortless. She put her lips to his neck, like a suction cup on a window. Once anchored, she released her fangs and sunk them deep into the muscular column. The jugular punctured before the man could react to what Prella was doing. His grip tightened on her shoulders, but it was a feeble attempt at defense. She bit harder, shoving her teeth deeper into the already bloodied flesh until she reached the carotid artery.

Prella felt the toxins stream from her fangs and into the man’s artery. For a vampire, the blood returning to the heart was just as satiating as the oxygen-rich blood leaving it, but Victorina had told her the toxin worked faster when the carotid artery took it to the brain. Though it was very rare for their victims to survive, it was a practice Victorina instructed her colony to abide by.

The release of the built-up fluid made Prella realize how swollen her fangs had been. She retracted her fangs and drank deeply from the man’s flowing blood. It took no more than 10 seconds for her to get what she needed. The man slumped to the ground at her feet, blood darkening his shirt and making a pool of what little she had left him with.

Something swooped in front of Prella’s face, making her jump and scream. It was a bat, squeaking with animalistic excitement. She had yet to hone all of her senses in her human form, but she was sure it was a vampire.

“Okay, I did it!” Prella exclaimed.

Victorina hung upside down from the roof of the club and watched Prella transform into a bat. There had been no sense of pride or relief on her daughter’s face. She shook her head and watched her youngest fly from her fears.