Chapter 5: The System
Obviously, I didn’t die.
Not a mortal death, anyway.
Instead, I became one of the un-dead.
Christian was my creator.
And also my first time.
“I did not plan to… to have sex with you,” he said in all truthfulness. “But I wanted–”
“A one night stand,” I offered and he nodded.
“For the lack of a better term, yes. It was your fault, really,” he accused genuinely. “You said you could like me and I could tell you wanted to stay with me. So really, you are just as much to blame.”
I laughed. It seemed he was feeling… guilty. Trying to justify his actions, anyway. “Christian, are you apologising for taking my innocence and my life in the same hour?” I asked lightly but he just looked away.
This was three days after he bit me. We were sitting on the bed. He’d already disposed of the bloodied pillow and bedcovering and thrown fresh new maroon sheets over the mattress.
“If I didn’t…” I hesitated. “If I didn’t make it seem like I wouldn’t mind being seduced by you, you would’ve just killed me by the door instead of kissing me, right?”
“I would have killed you as soon as you walked through the door.”
I felt no fear at this. He’d already told me a lot about our kind, how we were invincible. Our diamond-hard skin and even harder bodies. Reflexes so quick that we wouldn’t even be aware of the movements ourselves. Strength and speed that made us virtually invisible to humans when we ran at full throttle. Never getting tired…
I had nothing to fear anymore.
“But it was before,” he continued sombrely, “when you said you could have feelings for me. Something strange happened to me, and I wanted you in more ways than one.”
“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” I told him with a small smile. Christian really seemed to be feeling bad. “I’m glad I didn’t die a virgin.”
His face contorted in confusion. I could see the marble texture of his skin now. He was so much more beautiful than I realised. Along with our hearing, our eyesight improves after the conversion and I could really appreciate his good-looks. The contacts he’d obscured his eyes with, blue ones which turned his red eyes purplish, had been completely dissolved by the venom in his eyes by then and he hadn’t bothered with a new pair. The cool air I’d felt when I noticed his eyes changing colour for a fraction of a second was caused by the speed in which his hands replaced the dissolved contacts.
“Though I admire your sense of humour at a time like this,” he said eventually, “you cannot deny that you hate the fact that you slept with your killer moments before he killed you. The human in you, anyway. And then turned you into a monster.”
I hadn’t thought of it like that. Thanks a lot Christian! “But you didn’t kill me, not completely. Why?”
“It wasn’t something I planned, believe me!” he snapped. I waited for him to continue but he didn’t.
“But it was actually because…?” I probed. Yes, he’d told me a lot about himself and about vampirekind, but he’d avoided disclosing the reason behind my vampirisation. Which now seemed to have been unintentional…
The moment I’d accepted that I was going to die, die at the hands of a blood-sucking monster I hardly knew, and was surprised by how the painful draining of my body was accompanied by the kind of pleasure I’d never experienced, Christian had growled again. The sound was angry. Next thing I knew, the throbbing sensation was gone. The burning increased. And his teeth were no longer embedded in my throat. His weight was off me and a little later I felt a light breeze that disappeared as soon as I detected it.
He left me. For three days. In his bed, burning and aching and wishing for death to claim me as quickly as possible. Of course, I still thought I was dying.
I had no idea I was turning into a vampire.
When he came back, I’d sat up on the bed and was inspecting my surroundings, the numbness and burning gone. My mouth was dry and my throat – god, my throat felt like it housed a small sun in there.
A fierce, painful burning took permanent residence there from then on.
“So, it is done,” he’d said quietly as he entered his flat, looking me over. He threw my clothes at me, picking them up from where he’d undressed me three nights ago. I didn’t realise it, but I was dressed in under a second.
“What’s done?” I asked. Then I gasped. My voice – it sounded magical. Sounded like me but better, nicer, more… melodic. At the same time, I could smell everything in the room and outside it. Hear everything in the next street and perhaps the one after that. “What’s happened to me?” I cried but the words chimed like a bell.
“You have become a vampire, Ellie,” he said simply.
The words froze me to my spot. I’d already deduced he was a vampire, believed it, that’s why I didn’t laugh at his answer. That’s why I knew it was true.
I was a vampire.
He came and picked me up in his arms, sat me on the sofa and made the bed. Such a normal thing to do. Then he sat on the new maroon sheets and started to explain, induct me into this new world.
Fascinated, I went and sat next to him as he told me about his old life and new one. But he’d deliberately refrained from explaining why he turned me into a vampire. At that time, I was under the impression that he’d intended to make me like him.
My creator was still not telling me.
“Christian,” I pressed, “I know why I became like this, technically.”
Vampires are venomous and when you’re bitten by one, the poison not only paralyses you as it spreads through your bloodstream, but if pumped all the way around your body by a still-beating heart, it changes you. The conversion usually takes 2 or 3 days, before the heart thuds its last beat, and then it’s done.
You’re a vampire.
“But if you meant to drain me till I was an empty corpse, why did you stop drinking?” Ugh, the thought of drinking… blood… disgusting, unthinkable.
“That was your fault too,” he snapped.
“How?” I snapped back.
He hesitated before saying, “You tasted… you did not taste good.”
“Thanks,” I replied bitterly.
From what I’d learned so far that day, and having consumed a couple of bags of donated blood myself since then, I still can’t get my head around the fact that a completely healthy human with no drugs or alcohol or anything out of the ordinary in his or her system, could taste anything but good to a vampire.
“Well, you tasted wrong,” he said, “and it terrified me. I just had to get away before it… I managed to heave most of it out of me but the rest… The rest just made me feel ill. When I was myself again, I realised it was too late. You were probably already like me. And you are.”
“Huh.” I tasted so bad to him that not only did he stop feeding, but it made him sick for… for about the same time as it took for my conversion. “So…” I thought out loud, wanting to ask if he had any idea why I hadn’t been the dinner-date I should’ve been. Then I decided I didn’t want to know. It didn’t matter; I wasn’t that human with that blood anymore. “What happens to mistakes like me?” I asked instead.
As a human baby, I’d been a mistake. As a newborn vampire, I was no different.
After giving birth to me, my mother got stuck with me. I didn’t think that’d be the case with the vampire who made me.
“I gain nothing by killing you,” he said flatly. “And you’re too strong for me now, anyway. Of course, I have contemplated the notion that you would want to destroy me for creating you, taking your life, but I had to return to you before you left my flat. I couldn’t let you roam the streets without knowing the rules.”
“You still haven’t answered my question.” What happens to me now?
“I told you, I already have a mate,” he reminded me.
Yes, his mate was a vampire called Lydia. She created him especially to be her
companion. She worked for The System and was away on business. I’d already promised that I wouldn’t tell her that Christian cheated on her. I had no intentions of meeting her so the point was moot.
“I’ll go off on my own then,” I said brightly. The idea of independence thrilled me.
“That is probably best,” he agreed without looking at me. “Ellie, I am sorry that I cannot guide you further.”
“I’m sorry I tasted so bad.”
We exchanged a quick laugh before I rose to my feet. The movement was so fast and yet I could see every fibre of his shirt, hear the shuffle of my clothes against my smooth skin. These things are second nature to me now, but in my first few days, it was rather disorienting.
“Ellie,” he said as I headed for the front door. “Wait until its dark.”
We talked as we waited for nightfall. He finally asked about my mother – he’d been following me since that first time we met, so he knew the story. He regretted that I couldn’t patch things up with her anymore. I didn’t harbour the same regrets. I was still angry at her; those feelings hadn’t died with my human life.
In fact, they’d intensified.
I made him tell me a little more about Lydia, his mate, the one who created him a century ago.
“She can see into the future,” Christian said. “That’s why The System recruited her. They almost always need her because she can guide them on every mission, every job, every thing. So, she’s almost always away on work.”
“And you get lonely,” I said automatically. He flinched.
“We also have to move around a lot,” he said, changing the topic, “all over the world. When we come home, to London, we can’t return to the same place again, not for a few years. Just to be on the safe-side. The System encourages our kind to be mobile.”
He spoke like a normal guy who disapproved of the government, the politicians. A guy who didn’t like his girlfriend being away for work so much, the same distaste for his partner’s employer as any man in that situation.
“They wanted to recruit me too, but I refused.”
“Why, what special power do you have?” Some vampires have an additional supernatural gift, and of course the powers that be were most interested in the extra-talented ones.
Like any organisation, The System hired the best.
“You didn’t notice?” he asked, arching one eyebrow. When I stared blankly he said, “How I can shield myself from view?”
“You appear out of the blue! But you’re actually there all along, just hiding yourself?”
“When I first spoke to you in front of your friends, you didn’t think it strange that they completely forgot about us?”
I’d thought about it, but it didn’t seem strange. I thought my friends were subtly letting me get cosy with a fit guy. After both those encounters with Christian, Carrie did call and ask, “What happened to you Ellie, you just disappeared?” Assuming she was referring to how I ran away from Christian, I told her that I didn’t want to talk to him in case mum found out. I didn’t tell my best friend about the mild flirting between Christian and me – I couldn’t risk mum finding out that there was some mysterious guy lurking around.
“I can make you think that I’m not there, that you can’t see me,” he explained, “as well as anyone else I want to hide within my shield.”
“Like an invisibility cloak that you can wear whenever you want and drape over whomever you want?” I suggested excitedly, bouncing off my seat.
“It’s your mind that I throw a blind spot on, actually. I can make myself completely invisible to the whole world if I want. I can even throw my shield onto Lydia’s foresight, so she can’t see my future. It took me half a century to perfect it, but it was worth the effort.”
“Wow.” That explains why we didn’t get a single look, let alone get pulled up by the police, when we rode his bike to his flat. “So why does Lydia see the future but you have this cloak?”
“I think it has something to do with what special gifts or abilities we had as a human. So much of who we were intensifies in this life.” Yes, like my anger and irritation at my mother. “Lydia used to have premonition-like dreams. When she told her mother about them, and how many had come true in some way or the other, her family thought she was a witch and threw her out. This was a couple of centuries ago, when they believed almost everything this generation assigns the term fantasy to. Then her creator found her and… And I was very good at blending into the background. Out of sight, out of mind.”
“That’s hardly a gift,” I thought out loud.
“Like I said, I’m not sure what the reason is. There are some people who The System has created specifically because they thought he or she would have a special power, but it never materialised.”
“Such as…?”
“So-called psychics… men and women who seemed to go unnoticed by their peers… people who claimed to be able to hear other peoples’ thoughts…”
“Did they raid the local mental hospital to find these people?” I joked.
“Pretty much,” he laughed and I joined in.
“Do you think I have a special power?”
“No,” he said quickly. “I mean, you would know if you did.”
My mood went sour. “Was Lydia already working for The System when she made you?” I asked pointedly.
“Yes, why?” His mood went sour too. He knew where I was going with this.
“Are you sure she created you to be her mate or to join her employer?”
He didn’t speak.
“Does she even love you?” I pressed.
“Yes!” he snapped. “But I’m not naïve enough to think that my potential abilities weren’t a factor in her decision to make me,” he admitted bitterly. “Lydia’s always been very efficient.”
Obviously, their relationship issues went far beyond Christian’s dislike for Lydia’s workaholic behaviour.
“So, its 10pm now,” he said the next second.
Clearly, I’d overstayed my welcome. I grabbed the rucksack that I probably won’t need anyway but it would help the look I had decided on. Teenage runaway.
“Where will you go, Ellie?” he called when I opened the front door. I turned.
Despite knowing I had to keep out of The System’s radar, and just how close he was to this powerful organisation, I trusted Christian enough to tell him I was headed for London. That’s all I told him though.
“Happy birthday in advance, by the way,” he said with a smile. Then he was serious as he said, “And really, do stay out of their way, please.” I knew who he was referring to.
The System.