The First Death

I won. 

Blood drips thick into the drain. They sound like the haunting ticks of a clicking clock. I grip the basin. 

“I’m… I’m fucking done,” I say, peering into the mirror to look behind me at the hotel bed. At the bloodied, torn shirt with grimed palm trees printed on it.

Somewhere, a phone rings. 

****

“Wow, Vieja! This is the last comp before … you know who,” said Javi, his thumbs locked and his fingers wiggling above his head.

“He’s Dracula, not Voldermort. You can say his name.”

Javi chuckled. “Sorry, but the thought of meeting the guy gives me the heebie-jeebies.” He feigned an exaggerated shiver.

I surveyed the wrought-iron fence. I was sure I’d seen the entryway here somewhere. I wanted to take the long way around the west end of the cemetery. Catch the comp by surprise and start at the final boss rather than stroll in through the front gates and work my way up. 

It was dark where we were. The flickering strobe lights ticked from inside (an idea of the Triad’s to make things “spooky” as if fighting the dead wasn’t scary enough) were blinding the fuck out of me. 

The moon is obfuscated by a thicket of clouds that resemble gigantic scales. I thought it looked cool. Feels like we’re under the belly of a dragon. A mist unfurls from between the tines. I approached them with a furtive set of eyes, speculating. 

Something seemed too deliberate about them. Whirling and languidly tumbling through toward the side street. Maybe one of the vamps has a nifty fog gift? That’d be cool to have. 

Sometimes whenever a hunter killed a gifted vampire they took on their abilities. I hadn’t had one of those yet. I got close to the gate and frowned when I smelled it. Sniff, sniff, sniff. I must have looked like a chipmunk, my head thwarting left and right each sniff. Propylene, was it? Glycerin, maybe? The chemicals burning were used in fog juice. I frowned. The fog was fake. No nifty gift.

“I’m going to meet him.”

I sighed.  

“He’s not even here. He’s the next level. You know this is a competition, right?” my palm flipped up at him. “You honestly shouldn’t be here. And you’re definitely not meeting him.”

I wandered ahead. Javi tailed behind me. It was perfectly fine to have a cheering section so long as they were on the outside perimeter of the obstacle course.

The Triad warned adamantly against non-contestants approaching the cemetery. They wanted to avoid any further lawsuits should one of the vampires inside the course dismember an innocent. It happened before. Some hunter’s overprotective mom slipped in through the gates, somehow ran past security and started hitting a vampire on the back of its head with her purse. Great PR move for the Triad. Not so great for the mom. The vamp punched her heart out. Heard it was still beating as it gorged on it. Heart sludge and viscera everywhere.

The Triad captured high level vampires for these types of courses. I hadn’t a clue how they got them there. The course was laid out with five major events and each with their own skills test. Stealth, agility, endurance, strategic thinking, problem-solving, memory, and navigation. Once, a vampire hunter was crushed to death in the Crypt Labyrinth because she couldn’t solve a puzzle before walls closed in. Her family tried to sue, but all hunters must sign a waiver to join.

The ankle monitors attached to each contestant have built in sensors that timed us the moment we entered the course. They looked a lot like house arrest devices. It chafed like a bitch.

I heard Javi grunt a few paces behind me. I held firm to the stake in hand. Blessed by the Triad priests, it was polished and carved hawthorn, the only wood that can kill a lower-rank blooddrinker. I’d cut this stake extra sharp for tonight’s comp.  

“What? Me? Not meet the big guy?”

I rolled my eyes at him. His brow wrinkled, he looked genuinely offended. “Whaat?” he said.

“There are like five other hunters here, Javi. One’s bound to be as good, and I can’t have a,” I pointed at him, “distraction while competing.” He touched his chest in mock of an arrow being sent through it. “That hurt.”

“Anyway, I thought you were going to Sandra’s tonight?” I turned back to the fence, squinting through the bullshit fog. Beyond the mingling gray mists were a series of undulating hills, stones and mausoleums. Standard dead place. I could see where the graveled paths snaked through high-pillared tombstones and were eventually lit by the strobes.

“Mmm, no. She’s on a date with ‘big dick Tony,’” he pouted.

Eyes wide, I stared at him now. “Really, Javi?”

“Her words, not mine.”

I winced. “Sorry, bub.” He’d been crushing on Sandra for about a year and hadn’t once guts’d it up to tell her. Got friend-zoned and now he’s the bestie window shopping at the store of her new romance. 

He waved his hands at me like he was about to criss-cross them and Hand Jive.

He missed my smirk at the gesture.  

“Forget Sandra! Dude, look, I even wore my favorite Hawaiian shirt for this,” he said, pinching at the sides of the shirt and lifting left then right, left, right, left, left, right. His caterpillar brows wriggled. 

I smiled. This was why I loved Javi. But not love like that. Friend love. He wasn’t afraid to look like a fool. Sometimes we all needed to be okay with that. I needed to be.

I met him some years ago. He was some blood leech’s victim. Vamp dragged him out of a supermarket parking lot and was about to take the big drink when I staked it from behind. 

Over the years, he’d just kept in contact, and I let him. 

Javi reminded me of what it was to be normal, silly, fun—human. I wanted that around more. 

Normal isn’t something a vampire hunter has much of, and if any of us do tend to have it and manage to keep it they should count themselves among the rare and lucky few. Every hunter has their own story as to what turned them on—the switch to the proverbial lightbulb. The end of their normal. 

I hadn’t had anything normal since my grandmother. And that was years before meeting Javi.

And here we are. Under a small grove of twirling Live Oak I saw the opening. A few crooked tines, some bent and curling outward. I pushed the thought out of my head that this was more than just vandalism.

“Time for me to adios, Javi. Get to the bleachers.”

“Hey what? I can’t see from there! And isn’t starting here sorta cheating?”

Click-click-click-click-click! The noise came from inside. 

“What the fuck was that?” said Javi.

My hands became fists. My chest felt like it sprouted fiery flowers on the inside. “It’s .. what they do. And it’s not cheating if I kill it.”

“Javi,” I narrowed my eyes on him. “Go.”

“There’s like a big screen thingy somewhere you can watch on. Triad set it up. You shouldn’t be here though. The visitor bleachers are on the East side. Vete, pendejo. Vete, ahora,” I jerked my thumb over my shoulder.

He grunted, lifted his nose to peer at the distance. “Ehhh,” his shoulders shrugged.

I didn’t have time to argue. “Fine. If you’re going to be a girl about it,” I pointed at a spot twenty paces away from the gate. “If you’re not gonna go on over to the other side like everyone else. Stay there.”

He nodded and smiled, bouncing on his heels. “Yes, yes. Fine.”

I shook my head and slipped through the gate. I wish he’d just listen for once. 

The sensor went off and vibrated. The motion felt like a saw cutting against the bone of my newly rashed ankle.

****

Vieja is what people call me. It’s not my actual name though. It started with my grandmother. Over her famous cafe de leche she’d told me how she came up with it. She joked that I was an ‘angry baby’. I’d always glare at people from my stroller, eyes down with toothless pouts and big blue eyes. ‘You looked like such an old lady,’ she’d say, followed by a wheezy, soft laugh. I miss that laugh. I miss her. 

‘La viejita mas joven de todos,” she’d say, pinching my nose, ‘los tiempos y el doble de hermosa!’

In a southern barrio, she owned a casita perched on a hillside of a small cul-de-sac road. From her kitchen window I could see the terracotta-colored patchwork of stucco rooftops. 

Below the street serpentined narrowly throughout the neighborhood, sidled in spots by bougainvillea and hibiscus bushes and old-fashioned street lamps. At the center of the houses was a small plaza with an enormous fountain. 

In the daytime, the waters from the fountain sparkled so clear they seemed silver. People would go there to read, paint, soak up the sun and sit at the lip of the fountain. Some even flipped pennies in for small wishes. A few pennies were mine. I’d wished for my grandma to live forever so I could always live with her. It was a fun thought to have, and a little bit of tradition never hurts, even if we know the wishes would never come true.

Life was simple then. Safe. This was my normal. Mine.

It was evening. She liked to drink coffee before bed. She demanded it, saying that it helped her better than any tea to calm her nerves. 

“Dios mio, mija. What are you doing?” I was in the kitchen and just about to pour grounds into the coffee pot when she crept up behind me and smacked my shoulder a few times urging me away from the counter. 

I laughed, half embarrassed, half humored by her feistiness. 

“Making your night coffee,” I shrugged, chewing the corner of my mouth. At twelve everything is embarrassing.

“I should have known this is what you’ve been doing in the morning. That stuffs tasted awful. No, pero, this is a better way,” she said before working her magic.

I sat at the small bistro table and watched her. 

Over a burner she brought the water to a simmer, added a few heaps of coffee and started mixing with a wooden spoon the size of a pencil. When she poured in the milk she never stopped stirring. 

Sure enough the aromas wafted boldly into the air stronger than I’d ever smelled them before. 

“Brujah!” I said in jest and laughed. She smiled at me proudly, one eyebrow raising as she stirred with now even more vigor, stirring and stirring. 

This smelled nothing like the morning coffee. This was sweet like hot berries and toffee blending. It intoxicated my senses. The house was filled with this warm, earthy scent. 

This was my normal. Mine.

If I had known that was my last night of it, I would have remembered more. I would have kept in my mind more than just the aromas of coffee as my comfort.

****

She eagerly watched as I took my first sip. But I don’t remember what it tasted like. I hardly remember what she looked like just then. Was she satisfied? Did she smile? Trauma is like the winds of an unruly storm and memory houses made of feathers. They might come back but as flecks and fragmented pieces only. 

****

Killing is part of the vampire hunter trade, it’s part skill and part gift. Hunters are a special kind of trauma victim. 

Though some of us have had the luxury of learning about our bloodlines and specialities through books, portent nightmares, some even have birds visit them like Harry fucking Potter. 

I wish.

It was only death that showed me. Only death that shows me.

I was sleeping as it happened. 

Here’s my lightbulb:

True terror is listening to someone you love scream in agony. 

I’d never heard her voice make such sounds. Guttural, reedy, trying to speak through choking noises. It yanked me right up from my sheets. I was sure she was having a heart attack. 

My worst fear come to life. 

“Mama!?”

I stumbled in the dark of my room, tripped over something hard, probably a toy, and face planted against my door. 

“Rrrugh-ruh-ruh-ruh!” she screamed.

A few heavy thumps. I could hear things crashing about through the wall. She’d fallen and was trying to get up. She probably couldn’t control herself. The pain’s probably like a toothache in your chest. 

She’d fall again. Hurt herself even worse.

“Perate! Stop moving! I’m coming! Please, don’t try to get up,” for some reason I’d forgotten how to use a door knob. 

I pulled at the knob when I knew you just turned them. Pull handles, turn knobs, pull handles, turn knobs!

“Veee-veee-ve-ga-ga-guh. Vi.. e.. ja, rrruggh-ruh-ruh-runnnn!”

More crashing. Glass shattered. 

Panic locked around my fingers. 

My stomach churned. My intestines turned to soup. I felt sick.

I yanked and yanked some more until the knob broke off and half the door with it, what was left of it banged against my knee. I hardly felt it running past. 

I shouldered through her door. The wood splintered against me, groaned until it snapped.

The sight.

She lay staring at me with her head hanging off the side of her bed. Blood seemed neon against her paling skin. Her white hair appears vermilion-like in some places. 

The vampire dug its claws in her neck, using its fingers to mince her throat. 

It growled angrily close to her face. Glaring at her before raising its attention to me. Her hands were bent back at impossible angles. She’d tried to fight, but she was no match for it.

Her mouth stayed open. Blood creeped from it. Her chest was an open mess, parts of it too open, too dark to know what they were. Her mid-torso flopped and spread like a sea anemone, meaty and ripped. 

The vampire made a clicking sound in its throat, like a maddening tick of a clock. Click-click-click-click-click. Was it laughing? Was it growling? The vampire moved at me. It moved so slowly at first I almost thought it hadn’t been moving at all. It was hypnotic and timid, like a snake stalking its prey. As the vampire rose I saw the silhouette of a woman. Long black hair down to her hips, slick in places wet and dripping with a dark glossy liquid. The vampire was clad in something thin and white, a fabric I’d never seen before. It seemed thinner than silk. 

Its drenched fingers lifted, pointing at me. Reaching. Eyes like black pearls. Skin pale as clouded ice. I could see veins making branched patterns across its face. Through red scissored teeth, it slowly, very slowly leered. The mouth almost seemed bigger than its face. 

It hissed and leapt at me. I stumbled into the wall of the hallway so hard I thought I felt the bones in my back crack. It snapped its jaw at me. Again and again. Then its eyes went wide before it screeched, screeched so loud I felt my eardrums rattle. The inside of my head felt like it might burst. The vampire turned away from me and through keyhole shapes of its hair whipping around, I saw blinks of sunlight.

Dawn.

It fingered through the window, stems reaching us, climbing over my grandmother’s body. The light touched the vampire first. A piece of the vampire ripped off and slapped against my face. The back of my hand came away slimed, smelling like rot, black and viscid as tar.

The vampire fled, leaping down the hallway, moving through the darker parts of the house. I heard glass shatter in the distance. Then nothing more. 

The house was silent. We were left alone.

I stared at her with her eyes staring back at me. Blood down her eyes like red tears crawling to her forehead. I cried. I cried from the pits of my heart and crawled unto myself.  

Sirens emerge in the distance. They only needed to follow the child’s shrill and insufferable cries to find us.

****

The hotel room has a hushed calmness about it. My left shoulder screams with pain from when I pushed it back into its socket. 

The paramedic said I had three broken ribs. My right arm was in a sling. My eyes are swollen and resemble the mouths of fish. I’ll be fully healed in a few hours, but for now, everything hurts. 

I’d won. I won grandma. 

I limped into the next room. I eyed the bloodied shirt as the air conditioning hums and the phone rings.

“Hello,” I croak out, wincing as my ribs complain.

“Hello, this is Bogumir with the Triad. We are calling to congratulate you on your title as Master Vampire Hunter and hope you enjoy the cash prize. We hope you’re enjoying your stay at the Beaumont. As a consolation for today’s losses, we have added a bonus of one hundred thousand dollars to your account.” 

“Oh, I-I see. Thank you.” I’m sitting on the edge of the bed by this time. The pain in my face and arms fighting for attention.

I reach for the bloodied shirt. Tears sting my swollen eyes.

“There is just one thing. Your friend’s death,” Bogumir seemed nervous. I could hear him swallow through the receiver. “It was confirmed. It was the count. We are sorry his attendance was most unexpected.”

“Will you be accepting the invitation to fly to the final showdown?”

“Do you take room service, Bogumir?”

“E-excuse me?”

“Room service. Do you take it?”

“Well, uh… I suppose?”

“Good. Coffee then. Cafe de leche.” I said, squeezing the shirted palm trees in my hand. “Cafe de leche, and book that fucking flight.”