Status: I'm having a break from this one at the moment. I don't know how long for though, sorry.

The Vampician

Corpse on a Plate

Same Day, 4:54pm.

“Diana Elizabeth James!” Anna’s mum hollers before she even has a chance to close the door. “Where the hell have you been?!”

Anna cringes, closes the front door and kicks her shoes off, muttering, “Hello to you too.”

She enters the intricately decorated living room where she finds her mother sitting on the leather sofa knitting while watching the Antiques Roadshow. Her poker-straight, sandy-brown hair is concealing her face, but Anna knows she’s livid. She’s always livid where Anna’s concerned.

“Detention,” Anna mumbles, answering her mum’s question reluctantly.

“What have you done now?” Mum snaps, not much unlike Mrs. Jones herself.

“Fell asleep,” Anna replies. Elizabeth looks up from her knitting at last, but only so her daughter can see that she’s just finished rolling her eyes. Anna’s temper flares.

“I can’t help it!” she protests, trying to keep her temper under control. Her mother is the only one who can cause Anna to become so angry, and the only one who Anna can’t get angry in front of. It’s very frustrating, which of course only angers Anna more. It’s a viscous cycle.

“And how did I know you were going to say that?” her mum asks sarcastically, and goes back to her knitting, apparently as calm as a cucumber, but Anna notices her vigorous tugging of the wool.

“Maybe because it’s true, but who knows?” Anna replies, just as sarcastically. Like mother, like daughter - a saying Anna could kill you for voicing in her direction.

“I don’t believe it; it’s just an excuse, and an overly-used one at that,” Elizabeth states. Anna opens her mouth to protest, but her mum is faster.

“And don’t give me your illness crap.”

“Crap?” Anna’s incredulous. “But…even the doctors-”

“Have no idea,” her Mum interrupts. “It’s very convenient isn’t it? An illness no one’s heard of. You can make up your own symptoms and everyone’s none the wiser.”

“I’m not making it up!”

“No? Well, we’ll see how you do without your corpse on a plate.”

A few seconds of immensely tense silence follows this statement, during which Anna doesn’t breathe. She swears her heart skips a beat in shock and she makes a grab for the door handle as her body goes weak. It’s as if her body is reminding her of what will happen to it if her mother refuses her the meat she needs to survive.

“You can’t do that,” Anna says, barely a whisper.

“Your father, brother and I get on perfectly well without it, and so will you.”

Her mother might find her illness too convenient, but Anna finds it an incredibly inconvenient illness to have when your parents are vegans, and strict ones at that.

“Mum, I’ll die,” Anna says weakly.

“Stop being so dramatic,” Mum scolds. Anna’s too stunned to speak, or even move. Her own mum can’t want her to die, surely?

“And wipe that gormless look off your face! It doesn’t become you!” barks her mum and she closes her slightly open mouth.

“Mum…” Anna trails off, not really knowing what to say.

“Get out of my sight!” is her reply.

She leaves the living room and drags her feet up the stairs and into her bedroom, wondering why her life suddenly hates her, and, for the first time in her life, feeling sorry for herself. Anna’s never been one to brood, but as she flops down onto her bed and stares at the ceiling, she can’t help it. Why can’t her life be the way it was yesterday morning? When she was human, when her biggest worry was getting grounded, when her source of confusion was chemistry, and the most supernatural thing in her life was the way Aiden’s jeans didn’t fall down. Now she’s a vampire, her biggest worry is dying, her source of confusion is a scarred stranger, and the most supernatural thing in her life is, well, apparently everything. Why did it have to change?

Before she can attempt to answer her own question, there’s a knock at the door.

“It’s me,” says a voice she recognises as her older brother’s. She moves into a sitting position, crossing her legs, and tells him he can come in.

“Hey kiddo, what’s happened now?” he asks and sits on the edge of her bed.

“Mum’s gonna kill you for that,” Anna says, avoiding the question and nodding at her brother’s head, or, more accurately, his hairstyle. His hair is usually a dark brown but he’s put so much hair gel in it to make it stay up in a Mohawk that it looks black.

“You’re avoiding the question,” he points out.

“Nothing’s happened,” Anna lies.

“You didn’t knock,” he states, referring to the fact that every day for as long as they can remember, Anna has come home, knocked on her brother’s bedroom door but continued to her own before he has a chance to open it. She was so preoccupied with what her mother said that she forgot. She makes a mental note not to forget again.

“Mum thinks I’m making my illness up and isn’t going to buy me meat anymore,” she gives in. “She hates me.”

“She doesn’t hate you, she hates your illness.”

“But I’ll die, Joe.”

“No you wont. You can have my dinner money, I’ll have your packed lunch,” is Joe’s solution. Their mum never trusted Anna with dinner money, knowing she’d buy meat, yet her “perfect” son who always gets into trouble at school, smokes and defies her dress-code gets trusted.

“What, you’ll eat lettuce and tomato sandwiches and carrot sticks?” she asks, unable to picture such a thing.

“Less appetising than a cheeseburger, but it wont kill me,” he shrugs. “But it will kill you, so don’t worry, you’ll get your blood-soaked carcasses.”

“Well, when you make it sound so appetising…” she trails off and they both chuckle.

“I’m going out tonight, can you cover for me?” Anna asks as their laughter dies down.

“Yeah, what time?”

“’Bout half nine.”

“Okay, dokie, but remember-”

“Be careful, I know,” she finishes for him.

“Good, good. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he warns, standing up.

“Which excludes, what exactly?”

“Kissing boys.”

“Damn! That’s my night ruined!” Anna jokes, but Joe’s face becomes deadly serious.

“I’m kidding!” Anna bursts out laughing.

“You better be.”

“I am, I am,” she laughs. “Your face!”

“You trying to give me a heart attack? Or a prison sentence?”

“’Course not. I’ll only be with Aiden and maybe Jaycee, Catlyn and Brandon.”

“You better be.”

“Honest.”

“Good.”

“Well, I’m away to phone the twins, can you keep Mum downstairs for five minutes?”

“Sure, but first, repeat after me-”

“Boys are scum, they’re also smelly, I wont kiss one until I’m thirty,” they say together in a sing-song voice.

“Good,” nods Joe.

“Now go!” Anna shoos him and he leaves.

Anna takes Joe’s old mobile phone out of her pocket and places her sim card into it. Her Mum took her phone off of her when she grounded her last night, but Anna took the sim card out before entering the house, knowing that was likely to happen.

She switches the phone on and, since “C” comes before “J”, selects Catlyn’s number. It rings out so she tries Jaycee’s number instead. They’re pretty much always together and so don’t always both have their phones with them.

“Hey, Anna,” Anna suddenly hears Jaycee’s voice in her ear and jumps slightly.

“Hey,” she says.

“Cat, can you take Dixie?” Anna can hear them shifting the one-year-old between them. “Thanks. So, what’s up Anna?”

“Will you two be able to get away tonight?” Anna asks, wasting no time; she can’t top-up her phone very often.

“Probably not. Gran’s in hospital again so Mum’s gone to see her and Dad’s working late so we’re helping Mason with the little ones,” she explains.

“Ohh, that’ll be mayhem.”

“Just a bit,” Jaycee admits. “No, no, don’t eat that.”

“What’s Miles eating now?” Anna asks, aware of the four-year-old’s tendency to eat inedible things.

“Play dough.”

“Yummy.”

“He seems to think so. Mason!” she suddenly raises her voice and Anna jumps again. “Can you come clean Miles up?”

“I’m busy cleaning Elliot’s bloody nose again!” Anna faintly hears the twins’ only older sibling reply.

“Again? That kid’s gonna run out of blood before he turns ten,” Jaycee mutters.

“I’ll get him,” Catlyn helps, presumably as a result of Jaycee struggling to clean her brother and talk to Anna at the same time.

“I’ll let you get back to the madhouse,” Anna offers. “We’ll fill you two in tomorrow.”

“Fill us in on what?”

“Oh, didn’t I say? Mrs. Jones and Kieran are up to something.”

“Ohh, that’ll be interesting.”

“Yeah, in the woods in the dead of night.”

“Typical!” Jaycee giggles. “Why don’t evil conspiracies ever take place in a busy street at noon?”

“That would be far too undramatic.”

“Ah, but you’re still missing the owls and the thunderstorm.”

“I’m sure they’re working on that,” Anna says and Jaycee giggles again.

“Yeah, probably.”

“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

“Yeah, bye.”

“Bye.”

Severing the phone connection Anna’s spirits lower again as she remembers she’s now got three hours of boredom ahead of her. Before she begins brooding about the event that caused her to be late home, resulting in her grounding, however, she decides she’ll play her guitar to keep her mind off of it.

She gets off of her bed, onto her feet and lifts her foot to take a step towards the corner of her bedroom where a guitar should be sitting on the stand that resides there. Only it isn’t there. Her Mum must have taken it while she was at school.

“Well, that’s just great!” she growls, her temper flaring again and the foot she hadn’t yet placed on the ground kicks the wall instead. Her anger immediately deflates - she’s made a dent in the wall! She staggers backwards and sits on the edge of her bed again, breathing deeply, unable to keep her eyes off of the crumbling brick. There’s no way she just did that.

“When provoked by emotion such as anger or fear you become stronger and can run faster or jump higher than others your age,” a voice echoes in the back of her head.$

“Oh, shut up, Rex” she says aloud then mentally kicks herself (her foot’s done enough damage already) for using his name. She’d been hoping that referring to him as “the-idiot-with-red-hair” would make it easier to disbelieve him. This doesn’t seem to have been the case and Anna wonders if the use of his name means she’s ready to accept him and his wild stories.

To test this, she rises and takes a look at herself in her mirror. The first thing she notices is that she’s a lot less pale than she usually is. She’s pretty sure she knows why this is, but bile rises in her throat and she realises she’d rather not think about that. It’s one thing she isn’t ready to accept. But, she realises with a jolt, if she can’t accept that, she can’t really accept any of it.

She’s about to look away from the mirror when she notices the colour of her hair. It does seem to be “redder than ever” and quite significantly so. She wonders how she never noticed that before. Then she catches sight of the window in her mirror and realises. The sunlight which is currently streaming in through her bedroom window, brightening every colour in her room is absent in the mornings, which is when she normally looks in her mirror. She keeps the curtains closed in the mornings because-

“Sunlight is beginning to burn your eyes in the mornings,” Rex’s voice interrupts her own thoughts and she recoils in fright.

“It’s all true,” she thinks, backing away from her own reflection. “Vampires are real. I’ve met one. I am one.”

The backs of her knees hit the side of her bed. She’s still gazing at her frightened reflection, which now seems so far away, but no less real. Anna’s doubts are smaller than ever, to the point where they’re pretty much non-existent. The bile rises in her throat again as she realises what this means: if she’s accepted everything else he said, she has to accept-

“No,” she cuts off her own thoughts. “No, there has to be something he was wrong about, some glitch in his story. What else did he say?”

“Your eyes have a purple tinge.”

She rushes back over to the mirror on the wall. Her nose is almost touching the glass as she stares into her eyes, praying that the purple tinge isn’t really there, that her mind is playing tricks on her and she only sees it because she expects it to be there. She stopped believing in God years ago so knows her prayers wont be answered. She knows the purple tinge is there, battling with the blue and she knows the only way Rex could have known it was there was if it was a symptom because there’s no way he would have been able to see it from four feet away in the dark. She only wishes she didn’t.

She flops back down onto her bed, giving up in her denial, and begins wondering what happened to the good ol’ days where nothing mattered. When she was just a normal - if not a bit of a reckless - kid, who spent her summers with her best friend doing kid stuff, both with complete disregard to their own personal safety, and spent their winters doing exactly the same thing.

She begins thinking about those times, out with Aiden, getting up to all sorts of things parents wouldn’t allow. They always went back to Aiden’s first, because Anna’s parents would have hit the roof with some of the states she would have came home in. Aiden’s parents were different: Lucy would fuss and bring them clean clothes, and Derek would just laugh it off and tell stories about some of the things he got up to when he was a kid. Anna and Aiden were always glad Aiden’s parents understood that they were just being kids, because sometimes there was no way they would have been able to hide what they had been doing.

One of these instances was when they jumped across a small river that was still too wide and they went home absolutely drenched in freezing cold water, utterly delighted with themselves. Another was the time they were swinging from a rope attached to a tree and Anna lost her balance and fell, but didn’t have the sense to let go of the rope so it dragged her across the ground! Aiden spent about half an hour picking leaves and bark out of her hair, while they were both laughing hysterically, but she was still stunningly filthy when she returned home.

One of the things they enjoyed doing that gave Lucy reason to fuss was climbing trees that weren’t really meant for climbing and having to help each other down because they’d gotten stuck. Or, if they’d both gotten stuck they’d have to swing from one tree to another until they found one they could climb down. On one of these occasions, when they were about eight, the branch snapped and she was sent hurtling to the floor. Luckily it had been raining the day before so the ground was soft and no major injuries were acquired. After Aiden had made sure she was alright, he just jumped from the tree, expecting the ground to be softer than it actually was and twisted his angle. Once they had established neither of them were seriously hurt they just fell about laughing. Then he tried tickling her, so she got up and ran and he tried to do the same, forgetting about his ankle and fell flat on his face.

They got Nick, Aiden’s older brother, to take a photo of them after they had stopped laughing long enough for them to walk - or hobble - home. She has it somewhere in her photo album and, since she’s not looked at it for a while and she has time to kill, she slides it out from under her bed and begins flicking through it.

She stops a couple of pages in, even though she hasn’t found the photo she’s looking for. The one she has found, however, brings a smile to her lips. It’s her and Aiden on their first day of school, in the Andersons’ front garden. Anna’s surprised at how little he’s changed over the years. He still has that short mop of dark brown hair, his brilliant green eyes and so many freckles he looks tanned.

The girl standing next to him, however, gives Anna a shock. She can hardly believe it’s herself. Her hair, which is currently shoulder-length sandy-brown - well, reddish-brown now, she reminds herself - was elbow-length and an even darker brown than Aiden’s. Next to Aiden’s freckled face, Anna looks extremely pale and she doesn’t notice at first that her skin was actually less pale than it has been recently. Before she thinks about why that probably is, she continues flicking though the album.

A couple of pages later, she comes to the photo she was looking for. Aiden is a few inches taller than her but leaning on her for support, because of his bad ankle, and smiling like he’s just won a gold medal at the Olympics. Next to him, Anna - her hair a shade or two lighters than Aiden’s now, she couldn’t help but notice - is still in a silent fit of laughter, with her hand on the arm of the sofa to prevent her from dropping to the floor and rolling around in hysterics again. Anna laughs quietly to herself at the memory. Good times.

The very next photo shows her and Aiden sitting on the sofa with Aiden’s three-year-old sister, Sophie, nursing Aiden’s ankle with an ice-pack.

“Now, now, Aiden, you have to be more careful next time you go out to play. You’re going to get badly hurt one day,” Anna can still hear her little voice saying the same words Lucy always did and smiles. Sophie was only three at the time but was determined to be just like her mummy. It’s a shame Sophie can’t really remember her, since she died later that year, but Anna doesn’t want to think about that day or she’ll cry for the next hour.

Instead, she carries on flicking through the rest of the photos, but she doesn’t really notice anything but the changes in her hair colour. It had changed so slowly over time that she never noticed, but seeing her life in fast progression via the photo album has caused her to notice just how radically it has changed. She flicks back to the first photo and sees the almost black brown, then flicks to the end and sees the sandy-/reddish-brown it is now. She flicks to the start again, in denial; hair doesn’t change that drastically that quickly. She flicks to the end again, the start, the end, the start, the end…

She throws the photo album to the other side of her room in a sudden, irrational wave of fear, where it hits the wall and opens as it falls, as if to mock her. She’s about to reach over and close it, when sudden realisation hits - doesn’t the fact that she’s even in a photo mean that she can’t be a vampire? Also, she had a reflection when she looked in the mirror, and she doesn’t have fangs. She’s quite fond of garlic and she’s been christened. She ages, her heart beats and she’s pretty sure she can die.

None of these things, however, can completely convince Anna that she isn’t a vampire, since Rex never actually mentioned any of them and the things he did mention, he got completely spot-on. The only thing he was wrong about was her age - though he was right about her looking young for it - which he said was “fifteen-h”, whatever that was supposed to mean, and seemed genuinely surprised when she told him it’s a few weeks before she even turns fourteen.

“Diana!” her Mum’s voice suddenly screeches up the stairs. Anna jumps as she’s snapped out of her daydreaming yet again. Dreading what’s coming, she thumps moodily down the stairs.

“Control your feet! You’re a lady, now act like one!” Elizabeth snaps. “Anyone would think I was harbouring an elephant!”

Entering the kitchen, Anna spirits are lifted slightly when she sees the plates sitting on the kitchen table and realises her mother didn’t call her to shout at her. She regrets her loud descent on the stairs until she sees that it’s vegetable pie that sits upon the plates. She slouches into her chair, opposite Joe but not meeting his eye, and glares at her meal while her mum’s back is turned. However, she rapidly sits up straight and makes her expression neutral as her mum sits down in the chair to her left, which faces her dad’s empty chair. He’s hardly ever home from work these days.

Once Elizabeth has settled into her chair, she clasps her hands together, her children follow suit, and she says, “For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. Amen.”

“Amen,” Anna and Joe mumble and dig into their food without much enthusiasm, Anna wondering why God didn’t give her a mother who would allow her food she can be truly thankful for.
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All I really wanted to do with this chapter was establish Anna's relationship with her friends, her mum, dad & brother, as well as introducing more of what Rex told her, in such a way that wouldn't bore people, or make them think "information overload".

Did I succeed or epically fail?

And I've changed part of chapter 2, but the only difference is that Aiden and Anna no longer have a crush on each other.