Blood Isn't Always Thicker Than Water

Life is cruel. Deal with it. I’m sure millions of you live in houses, have internet, Television, friends and know at least one blood-relative, unless you’re some adopted person.

Well, here’s my life story:

Four days after birth: thrown into a river by my father. I wasn’t supposed to live, but I did.

Next day: found by the nice lady who raised me, Marietta Carver. She didn’t have any children, so she “adopted” me and took care of me.

Age two: found by police. They took me straight to an orphanage. It broke Marietta’s heart, bless her. She is the only person I respect out of love and reverence of her devotion. Others I respect out of force, demand, authority. Occasionally even fear. But Marietta didn’t deserve her year in jail. She did a good deed by raising an abandoned child.

You may be wondering how I know I was dropped into a river. That, reader, is a story for another time.

At age five I was visited for the first—and last—time in three years. The visitor gave me something to drink, but even to this day he hasn’t told me what it was, though I figured it out on my own.

The visitor “adopted” me, and brought me to this place in southern Idaho. There was one other kid there, a young adult and the guy who “adopted” me. The kid was Troy, the adult-ish girl was Kaitlin and the fifty-ish looking guy was Logan. I’d never bothered with asking their last names. I knew they weren’t related.

The house was an old manor sort of place. I grew to like the large, empty rooms and halls, the creak of the floorboards, the sound of scurrying mice and Kaitlin humming haunting tunes.

But when I was ten and had been living inside for five years, going outside only twice in counting since I first stepped over the threshold—I looked like a ghost, I was so pale—I was told why the heck Logan had adopted Troy and I in the first place.

In other words, I was told about vampires, or what they really are. “Vampires” are actually normal people who spontaneously came into the world with a liking for the taste of human blood.

Except for me.

I was descended from “purebred vampires”. They started with a tribe of cannibals that passed on the taste for blood.

And I just had to be unlucky enough to be descended from them.

At eleven years of age, I got to go outside for the first time knowing I was a “vampire”. I was to be taken to the King of “Vampires”. It’s sort of pathetic. We don’t even have a name for ourselves.

And while I was walking across the country, I got to see the lives normal people led. I immediately found a love for music. A few of my favorite genres just off the bat were rock, rap, pop, alternative and R&B. I liked some metal and a few country songs caught my interest.

Along with music, I discovered the wondrous invention of TV. I also found out that you could watch TV on something called a computer. At Logan’s it was a miracle that we had electric lights and a refrigerator that worked.

I begged Kaitlin, for she had a soft spot for me, and she bought me an iPod. She also bought me my first CD: Take This To Your Grave by Fall Out Boy. I managed to sneak into a house one night while Logan, Troy and Kaitlin slept at some hotel and I used a computer to put the songs onto the iPod.

But…the noise of civilization! We took a stop in some city, and that night I couldn’t fricken fall asleep, excuse my French. Logan was always telling Kaitlin she shouldn’t cuss. Especially in front of the kids.

It took us about a month to reach our destination that was somewhere on the east coast.

All the King did was he sized up me and Troy, ignored Kaitlin completely and told Logan to bring Troy back when he was “of age”.

How sketchy is that?

So, we all walked back to Idaho. We actually took our time and toured around, so it took us three months to get back to Logan’s. I can’t call Logan’s manor “home”. Marietta’s modest little cottage was home, and that was never going to change, unless I got
a place of my own.

Logan gave me and Troy five hundred dollars each for the return trip, and I was very happy when Troy found out he couldn’t buy a car with five hundred bucks. I hated the noise that they made. But they were all over the place. The airplanes were worse. I decided the minute I found out what they were that I would never ride one, ever. I have not broken that promise.

With my money, I bought a laptop computer off this guy who was selling everything he had to get out of debt. So I basically did him a favor, right?

Well, I immediately became skilled in hacking, or whatever you call it. I got illegal free internet and downloaded some software that lets you get music for free.

I was in heaven.

For the time being.

When I was fourteen, Logan died of some rare disease he caught while “on business”. Or so the King told Troy, Kaitlin and I when we took three quarters of a month to scramble across the country to get to him.

Kaitlin was twenty-nine, and didn’t know how to hell to live in the world with no one there to guide her. She committed suicide the night she found out that Logan was dead.

Troy and I sold the manor two months later, then moved into a small house in Nevada. It was a thirty-minute drive from where Marietta used to live. Turned out that she died, too.

Troy got a job as a stripper or something. The dumbass. He ended up dying at age fifteen by drinking too much alcohol or doing drugs or something like that. I actually did something worthwhile.

I got a job at a music store. I had to take three showers in one day before feeling presentable enough to show up for the first time, but I did it.

And one day when I was fifteen—six months after Troy died, I think—I almost got a heart attack when I saw the face of a person on the cover of a magazine.

Was it me? He looked like me. But he was too old.

I read the names of the people shown on the cover and started to wonder.

Was I related to this guy?

There was one thing I knew for sure. I looked one hell of a lot like George Ryan Ross.

The third.

At sixteen I received a letter in the mail (I think it’s a wonderful invention; having slots in you door is awesome, especially if you have female neighbors) saying that “it was time”. Yeah, you guessed it. The King of “Vampires” wanted to see Troy. So, obviously, I got off my ass and booted over to the east coast.

On a train.

I clenched my teeth the whole time. As a “vampire”, I technically needed about twenty hours of sleep a week, but I couldn’t get a wink of it the whole time the great machine was clinking an clanking precariously over the thin rails set in the ground.

The music definitely helped. Working at a music store gave me discounts, so I had about every new album that had my genres of liking on it.

My iPod was almost full, too.

I finally made it to the King’s, and he gave me a job to do since Troy had died. I would be given almost anything I wanted, except for the throne and anything else the King deemed unreasonable. I was to find the one human among billions that was destined to continue the “vampire” race. Really, I don’t see what’s so special about us, but the King wanted this girl. She was to be recognized by her status as an only child and a strange gold stripe through one eye.

How the hell am I supposed to find a girl like that?

But a serious stroke of luck came my way. Wile I was riding the train back (airplanes were not an option) I pulled out my laptop and saw some random advertisement.

The girl in it had a stripe of gold through her left eye.

I feverishly started looking her up. Eventually I found her name and looked her up on this thing that tells you where people live and crap. She also had a Twitter, which I found and followed. She babbled on about how she had found a job she liked, wished her cousin wasn’t a model with her and all this other jibber-jabber. She also mentioned somewhere that her cousin was Andrew Hurley.

So Fall Out Boy was her family…

The next week was when I met “vampire” Rick Ricardo. He ran a music shop, and it was just a mile away from where I worked. Rick also housed homeless “vampires” that live on the floor above where the store was. A lot of “vampires” were outcasts. Weird coincidence, I hope.

When I fist walked in, Rick thought I wanted to join his little slave-pack of hobos. But then, I surprised him by making a request. He didn’t believe me at first, thought I was some worker for the King, only there to rat him out for illegally housing “vampires”. I told him that I didn’t know it was illegal, even though I did because Marietta had been put in jail for raising me. Well, I was thought to be human back then… Whatever. I just wanted to seem sort of innocent.

Rick eventually came to believe me and granted me my wish. I wanted a partner to travel with me. A “vampire” partner.

Rick took me upstairs and introduced me to his “vampires”. They were all males, and at first I thought there were only four of them. In the dim light, I couldn’t see the fifth. Just for the record, that means that the light was really really really really dim.

Rick was halfway through introducing me to the visible four when the fifth stood up from his corner, walked forward, and slowly spread a grin across his face. After another two seconds, he spoke into the silence that had followed his appearance. He seemed to be my age, but the other four had open disgust for him. I didn’t see anything wrong with him until I focused on his eyes. They were filmed over, coloring them a ghostly pale blue.

Then, he spoke, in a voice that sounded aged with knowledge, yet young with curiosity. It chilled me to the marrow, freezing my core.

He said, “Caspian Ross… I’ve been waiting for you.”

I glanced at Rick, then back at the creepy dude. I pointed to the latter.

“I want that one.”

Now Jeremy and I lived in the house Troy and I had bought. Jeremy was partially blind, so he could only see when it was extremely bright. But he could sense things I couldn’t. Like how he had known my name when I could only guess it. Sometimes he even got glances of the future. I liked having him around, and he was relieved beyond description that now he didn’t need to stay in one room, shunned by others. He respected my hate for raucous noise, and I helped him whenever he needed it. I felt bad for the guy. A part-blind “vampire”… I would despise my life more than I did then. Jeremy embraced his with open arms, letting the world decide his fate and going with the flow.

But he did try his hardest to pull through on his own. Once he seriously fell into a trash can, one of those huge ones. It looked like it was straight from a movie.

If I had laughed, I would have been dead. He could feel vibrations like a snake, and he’s a lethal fighter in an open space.

But he just couldn’t avoid the trash can.

I told him about my job for the King after he had been living with me for two months. It was actually a week after I turned seventeen. Jeremy informed me of my birthday the very day I turned seventeen. I sat us down at the dining room table and looked into his filmy eyes. Jeremy had had to stay at the house all the time, even when I went to work, but he didn’t mind. He like the “space”.

I guess this place would seem big to someone who had lived in one room since he was found on the streets at seven. To me, however, I missed the long, dark halls of Logan’s manor. Some nights I just lay down early and thought about Marietta and Kaitlin. I missed them both. Troy and Logan…not so much. I was thankful to Logan for taking me out of that oppressive orphanage, but he just took me to the manor which wasn’t that much of an improvement, people-wise.

So I told Jeremy about how I needed to find a certain girl. I told him everything I found out about the one that matched the King’s description: Samantha Royce.

He stayed silent through my whole monologue. And when I was done, all he said was, “The time will come”.

So much for a partner that would help. “The time will come.” What’s that supposed to mean?

But I didn’t press Jeremy for more. He wouldn’t tell me anything if I did. Instead, I nodded and pretended to understand.

Jeremy smiled evilly back.