The Power to Turn

“So, what’s the catch?” Bonita asked as the vampire prepared to sink his fangs into her neck. She knew he would take the question as normal human nervousness. She was counting on that tendency to underestimate normal humans.

He paused, a scant millimeter from the pulsing artery.

The cold breeze of his breath raised goosebumps on her skin. Bonita shivered. She turned her head toward him in time to watch him win the internal struggle and pull back.

Accusingly he said, “You already agreed to let me turn you.”

“Yes, but now that it’s time . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she waved her hand as though unable to explain. Bonita shot him a glance from under her long, exotic lashes.

For months she had enviously watched him driving his classic Corvette Stingray convertible to and from the iron-gated estate at the end of her road. His clothes were as expensive as his mansion and the tasteful hunter-green ’Vette. Wealth, power, and immortality went along with being a vampire. All one had to give up was one’s humanity.

Now she sat inside that house, on a leather-covered burgundy sofa nine feet long in a room large enough to be an art gallery, walls covered with expensive photographic prints and paintings, floor studded with sculptures, beside a vampire who wanted to change her into a creature like himself.

“We’ve been through this,” he said. “You have no intimate partner, no close friends or family.”

That was not precisely true, but Bonita did not contradict him. Her twin, who lay in a coma in the nearby hospital, might as well be dead.

He continued, lisping a little around the still-exposed fangs, “Your job is driving you crazy. You’re tired of living so close to the edge.” His pale face eased closer.

Bonita didn’t move away. “I know what I’ll get out of being turned. What’s in it for you?”

The vampire—Chase, he’d told her to call him when she engineered their first meeting, but she preferred to think of him simply as “the vampire”—didn’t answer right away. His fangs clicked back into place, and he ran his tongue over them. “It’s a compulsion,” he said at last. “Like humans’ sex drive.”

She’d used her beauty to capture his attention, let him believe she had an erotic nature that craved excesses of passion. Of course he would think that answer would satisfy her. Deliberately misinterpreting his plain words, she steered the conversation toward what she really wanted to know. “You mean it’s your biological clock ticking?” She shook her head. “Why, if you need to make more vampires so badly, have you never done it before?”

“I have. Just not for a while.”

“So you’re out of practice? Is that why this—” gesturing toward him, then back to herself “—feels so awkward?”

“The last person I turned was nearly a hundred years ago,” he ground out. “Back then, the process didn’t involve a protracted negotiation.”

“Yes, well, times have changed. So where did these other vampires go? Or did you kill them—” She broke off in pretty confusion. “Sorry, I mean ‘put an end to them,’ since you’ve explained that technically vampires are already dead, and their existence can only be ‘ended’ by direct sunlight or an oak stake to the heart.” She’d made sure of that during their first discussion about being turned.

“I certainly did nothing to harm them. I couldn’t. Once you’ve shared blood with someone, there’s an intimacy, a closeness.” He seemed sincere. He added, “A oneness, if you will. Humans have never experienced that and cannot truly understand.”

Bonita could have told him he was wrong, for she, who had shared the blood of her sister in the womb, had inexplicably known the moment one car slammed into another, stripping away her sister’s consciousness, though they were miles apart at the time. Stamping down the jolt of pain the memory brought back, she asked, “So, then, where did they go, these vampires you made?”

Again there was a pause. During their first conversation, she had concluded the vampire would not be a good poker player. Although his face lacked expression, his timing always gave away his discomfort with topics that hit too close to home.

“They walked into the sunlight of their own free will,” he said at last.

“Why, if unlife as a vampire is so great? I’ll ask again, ‘What’s the catch?’”

“Do you want this or not?”

Bonita stared at him until he stirred, heaved a sigh, and admitted, “All right. It can be boring. The same routine night after night. Unrelieved boredom with no end in sight. Some vampires have tried mastering new skills—playing piano, writing poetry, star-finding. After a few decades, even the most passionate interest palls.”

“Have you ever been tempted to put an end to your existence?” Bonita asked, though she didn’t really care what he answered. It wouldn’t make a difference to her plan.

The vampire shrugged. “I don’t find my nights tedious. I expect you will enjoy yourself, as I do, and won’t think of leaving the world.”

She would be satisfied with a house and car and expensive trinkets, he meant, judging her just as Bonita had intended him to.

“None of these vampires died of illness? No cancer, no infections?” She put a hint of skepticism into her voice.

“You’ll find that a vampire’s blood is healing. It can even turn back age, repair damage.”

That was the last piece of information she needed.

“Not that you need to worry about that. You’re being turned in your prime.”

As if convinced by the clumsy flattery, Bonita angled her face away and opened her neck to him. “Let’s get it over with.”

The fiery sensations as their blood mingled, a maelstrom of rage and terror and orgasmic pleasure, ebbed slowly, leaving Bonita weaker than she had expected. “Is that it?” she asked the vampire—or, rather, the other vampire, if the turning proved successful.

He lay beside her on the sofa, arms wrapped around her.

“Rest now,” he muttered.

She pushed out of his embrace. Away from him, air seemed to be streaming over her sensitive skin, a gentle constant breeze. She looked down at her body and was startled to find herself still clothed.

Bonita rummaged around in the shadows beside the sofa and found her bag. She took out the knife within. After slashing her arm with the blade, she watched the cut heal.

She nodded with satisfaction. The vampire might have lied about other things, but about the power of a vampire’s blood to heal, he had been correct. That was all she needed to know.

Bonita took out two other items from her bag.

Returning to the vampire’s side, she pressed her hand against his chest and found the hollow below his sternum. She braced the point of the oak stake there and used the mallet to hammer the wooden shaft deep into the vampire’s heart.

He writhed and screeched in his death throes as she watched without pity. When it was all done, she dragged his body out into the moonlight where it would burn away come day.

Then she went to the garage and released the Corvette onto the road, heading for the hospital where her sister waited to be healed with one good turn.