Without a Sound

(Charlotte’s P.O.V.)

At first I didn’t know what to day to Celia. I held on to the feeling of the blood in Mikey’s veins for as long as I could, but at last we had driven so far away that he was out of range. Celia saw me sigh.

“Are you scared without him?” she asked me curiously.

Frowning, I answered, “I don’t really know what it is. I mean, I do trust you to look out for me – obviously more than he does.”

“He wouldn’t trust anyone but himself to keep you safe,” she said, laughing. “Maybe not even himself.”

“Probably not,” I muttered, and that was the end of the conversation.

After a few minutes of driving, she tried to get me to start talking again. “So Mikey took you hunting for the first time the other day?”

I nodded.

“And how did that go?”

I grimaced. “Perfectly fine until we left the house. It all went downhill from there, especially when our prey had a dead woman’s body in front of him.”

Celia winced appropriately, saying, “I’m guessing Mikey didn’t take that very well.”

“You guess correctly,” I said shortly. “Mikey says you and Gerard hunt differently than he does. What did he mean?”

She glanced at me warily. “What he meant was that we’re… less picky about who we drink from. We understand and support his choice to only kill criminal men, but… we don’t do it that way.”

“So you kill innocent people,” I concluded bitterly, summing up her little speech.

Celia cringed slightly as if I had struck her with a blow. “We are vampires that feed on humans, just as sharks feed on smaller fish or lions eat antelopes. It’s the natural way of things,” she replied, trying to defend herself.

I felt my eyebrows furrow together. I was a little bit confused. “So you think of yourselves as a different species, even though you were originally human?”

“Yes,” she clarified.

“What about your son?” I asked. “Isn’t he human?”

She looked careful, like she thought she was walking on eggshells. “He is,” she confirmed. “The offspring of vampires are born human.”

Suddenly my head was full of a million questions about her son. “Can vampires even have children? How does it work? Why are they human?” I blurted, unable to keep all my questions at bay.

She laughed shortly and said, “I’m glad you’re asking me this instead of asking Mikey. He wouldn’t be comfortable telling you.”

I tilted my head to the side and waited for her to continue.

“We, as vampire women, are indeed immortal. But immortality comes with a price that we must pay, even if we never agreed to the deal. When we became vampires, we were almost completely robbed of our ability to bear children,” she said with a far away look in her eyes.

Almost? I prodded. She nodded absentmindedly and continued, “That cycle that used to come once a month only comes once every ten years now. Ten years – never one day sooner or later. Then we can have children. The child is always human, and nobody knows why. Typically one of the parents will change their child once they are grown up. Gerard and I will give Adam the choice, but I think we want him to choose to be human.”

I nodded and then looked out the window. It was a lot to take in, and we were entering the city again. This was a much nicer part of the city, and it was also more modern. It looked like it was a lot safer, too.

The mall was a huge, clean, and bright building Celia eyed me uneasily as we got out of her red car. Not her too!

She saw the dismay on my face and laughed. “Relax. I was just going to tell you to stay close to me, don’t react strangely to technology, and don’t worry about spending too much money. Mikey had plenty.

I nodded. “Okay. I’ll do my best,” I replied determinedly.

We walked up to some doors to the mall, and they opened without anyone toughing them! It gave me a little scare, but I remembered Celia’s warning. Putting on a brave face, I walked through the strange doors.

Celia stopped suddenly, biting her lip. “What’s your style, Charlotte?”

I examined her clothing, which looked extremely strange to me. “Um, I’ve been away from this world for… who knows how long. I’m pretty sure early 1900s is my style,” I whispered to her.

“Oh yeah,” she said curtly. “I better pick out your clothes.”

I nodded, and we started shopping. Jeans, pants, capris, shorts, skirts, tee shirts, sweatshirts… We started with clothes before lunch, and I didn’t know how Celia planned on carrying all of our bags.

Everything in the mall was so strange! There were huge fountains, automatic doors, and even stairs that moved up when you stepped on them so that you didn’t have to walk up them! But the mall itself wasn’t the most interesting thing.

The people caught most of my attention. I was finding it pretty easy not to drink their blood because of all the blood I drank the day before. Everyone looked different. They had different colored hair, different colored skin, they were different sizes, and they had different ethnicities. Some of them wore an abundance of clothes, while others – usually young women – looked to be wearing almost nothing.

And God, the prices! I looked at the price tag on one of my pairs of jeans, dropped them, and started at Celia. “Fifty dollars!” I exclaimed in surprise. How…” I was speechless.

“It’s not really that much…” she muttered slowly, confused. Then her eyes lit with understanding. “Oh! Don’t worry. Due to inflation, money is worth much less now. With a dollar… you can buy about a candy bar.”

I nodded slowly, still shocked. She patted my back and said, “You look hungry. We’ve bought enough clothes for now. Let’s go grab something to eat.