Stigmata

Vivien stirred on the couch, and began to sit up as she rubbed the disoriented feeling from her eyes. She had begun to grow more accustomed to that hung-over headache, dry eyed feeling she encountered upon waking, and she wasn’t certain she liked the phenomena. It seemed to her that every time she woke with that hung-over feeling, something awful that she couldn’t remember had happened to her before she had fallen asleep - which was all too true.

The little redhead couldn’t help but gasp as she tried to pull her body fully upright - the morning sun stung and burned her eyes in a way it never had before. Slowly, the glued-in contact haze had dissipated from her eyes and she began to notice things; Zachy, staring at her tentatively while standing beside the dinette with an anonymous solo cup in his hand, Brian, with the whole bottle of that burning alcohol she couldn’t stand in one hand and a strange-looking knife in the other, Matt, who sat in the armchair front seat and seemed to be holding Valary on his lap by force, Jimmy, who was the only moving toward her and not staring, and the usual absence of Johnny, which Vivien’s tired subconscious attributed to the man’s strange sleeping habits.

“Vivien, how are you feeling?” Jimmy’s lanky frame immediately occupied the space where Vivien’s sleeping torso had been. Before she could answer, Vivien felt compelled to begin braiding her long red waves, and wondered why she couldn’t move her hands.

“I think she feels like she’s been hit by a truck, right, Viv?” Matt’s anxious face peered around the back of his seat as he restrained his visibly struggling girlfriend. The dancer tried to turn her head toward him to nod, but she couldn’t feel the muscles in her neck and they sure as hell weren’t going to do their job on their own.

“Vivien?” Brian’s face, devoid of its normal shit-eating grin, appeared in Vivien’s limited line of vision. “Can you hear us?” Again, the redhead struggled to nod, but couldn’t bring herself to move her too-heavy head. In the meantime, Matthew had passed his girlfriend to Zachy’s arms for restraint, and his face entered Vivien’s fuzzy view. After what seemed like long minutes but could only have been seconds, Matt’s rough hand grabbed her chin and forced her unfocused eyes to meet his.

“Vivien. Talk to me.” She couldn’t, and he knew it. Matt raised a brow at Jimmy, who still sat directly behind the invalid guitar tech, a concerned frown plastered on his usually smiling face. “She’s there and thinking, she just can’t perform basic motor functions. Our time might be up, Jimmy.”

The Rev shook his head, and turned the lithe girl by the shoulders to face him. After a moment of concentration, during which Vivien’s gaze could hardly stay near his face much less on his eyes, Jimmy’s frown turned into a look of grim concentration.

He addressed the men in the bus - Johnny had emerged from the back of the bus in a towel to join the group. “She’s not gone. We need to act fast. Brian?” Then, Jimmy turned his attention back to the now-nauseas Vivien. “This is going to suck. We’re going to save your life. But it’s going to kill you.”

If Vivien could have given a start, she would have. If she could have asked a question, she would have, and it would have been filled with a hell of a lot of profanity. But as it were, she couldn’t even move her head to nod or shake it. If she had wanted to just die, she had almost no way of doing so. All she could do was watch through half-closed eyes as Brian and Matt set about the cabin, turning off lights and drawing shades (including one between themselves and the driver) until the bus was nearly pitch black. Zachy had moved to the dinette, still watching Vivien warily as he held Valary firmly by the wrist of one arm.

Before her unseeing eyes, Matt and Brian seemed to enter some sort of silent tussle, where they stared into each other’s eyes meaningfully with balled fists before, finally, Matthew turned away. Brian took the only remaining seat beside Vivien.

“You ready?” He asked Jimmy, who nodded sagely. In a motion so fast that Vivien almost missed it, Brian chomped down on his own wrist - hard enough to draw blood. If she could have moved at all, the little redhead might have thrown herself out of the moving bus’s window. What the fuck was wrong with these people? Before she could even form the thought, Brian had pressed his wrist to her lips, covering her face in blood which began to drip down onto her white tank top.

For a moment, Vivien was repulsed - they thought they were Vampires?! But after that moment, she could barely stop herself from parting her lips, couldn’t resist the usually disgusting, coppery tang of Brian Haner’s type O. She sucked greedily from his wrist as if it were water pouring from his veins rather than life-giving red liquid

“Vivien, that’s quite enough.”

She didn’t understand what was going on as Jimmy pulled her tiny frame away from the wrist she clutched to her mouth with both hands, and growled as the appendage was removed from her grasp. Life had become much different during the strange ritual she had just finished (or so she believed), her mind ached with the clarity of the things around her. She couldn’t take it. Vivien smashed her eyelids together in an attempt to block out the light - there was so much light! The blinds were drawn closed, but the bus seemed like it was alight from every surface.

A feral growl escaped her throat as Brian grasped her slender wrist in his calloused hand, and suddenly Vivien felt as if all the strength in the world resided in her tiny body. She irrationally bucked and fought against Haner’s grasp, even though she knew the man would never hurt her, and was eventually pinned down between Jimmy and Matt. Their grips were of iron.

Vivien gasped as a searing pain shot up her arm, and she strained to watch as Brian Haner’s unusually elongated canines sunk into her unblemished skin; he began to suck greedily at her wrist. If she had the basic capability of speech, she would have screamed - or at least ask what the fuck was going on in this fucking hole of a tour bus.

From where he held Vivien against the couch by the shoulders, Jimmy sought Zachary’s bright blue eyes, and gave the guitarist a slight nod. Once more, Valary was unceremoniously passed from man to man, and Johnny sat beside her in the booth, barely holding the blond captive as the pair watched the ongoing event with greedy eyes, enthralled and waiting to see what would become of the little dancer.

Zachary’s cool hands on her forehead were enough to settle Vivien into a deep sleep in Jimmy’s grasp, and Brian carefully arranged her wrist so that she wouldn’t bleed on her white tank top any more.

“Well that was relatively uneventful,” Sanders offered, as he proffered a hefty gauze pad and a length of medical tape to Brian.

“Thank whatever deity you feel like that it was. Or you’d be dead.” Haner’s tone left no room for jollities as he quickly wrapped Vivien’s wrist. “I didn’t want to have to do that.”

“Because staying human worked out so well for your last girlfriend, huh?” After a moment, Brian finished his taping job of the twitching Vivien, and very gently set her arm across her chest in what looked like a comfortable position; with the same hand, he turned and socked Matthew in the jaw. Hard.

“Watch your mouth, ass wipe,” He spat, trying with all of his might to get at Matt through Jimmy’s fast-acting restraint work. From where he had retreated - the curtain which divided the driver’s seat from the rest of the bus was as far as he could manage - Matt smirked as he wiped a dribble of blood from his jaw and set his mandible back in place with a delicate twist of the neck.

“It’s true,” He spat, as Jimmy forced Brian to sit on the couch by Vivien’s slumped-over form.

“Let’s not do this right now,” From his place at the dinette, Johnny had moved to the kitchen sink to make a round of drinks he hoped would calm the group. “Let’s just celebrate?”

“What’s there to celebrate? The death of Vivien Hopwood?” Brian asked grimly, as he accepted the drink Johnny waved in front of his face - the bassist had figured that if he could diffuse Haner’s nerves first, the rest of the room would soon calm.

“How about new member of this deranged thing we call a coven?” Zachary shrugged as he reached to snag one of the drinks Johnny had just made. As he lifted it to his lips, it floated straight from his hand and across the bus to land in Matt’s tattooed hand; Zachy regarded him with a pout. “That was mine!”

“Calm the chatter,” Jimmy leaned against the refrigerator with a drink and a cigarette and stared into outer space as he spoke - his gaze fixated on a spot somewhere above their heads. The small, mobile room quieted nearly instantaneously as the boys turned to face gangly, goofy Jimmy, who stood looking quite pensive (an expression who’s seriousness was ruined by the solo cup in his hand). “This poses a slight problem now, doesn’t it?”

The Jimmy who spoke was not the crazed drummer renowned for his antics less so than his skill (although the latter was considerable) that Vivien would have known in the daylight world. His usual maniacal grin had been replaced by furrowed brows and a wise smile which played at the left corner of his lips; instead of the colloquial slang he used during the daylight, he spoke in a hard yet slurring accent which must have been of Slavic descent.

“I would be loathe to think of the lil’ miss as a problem,” The accent Haner had imitated so perfectly belonged to blue-eyed Zachary, who sat in the now-abandoned armchair beside the kitchen area of the bus. Nearby in the dinette, beside the stunningly quiet Valary, Matt piped in.

“It is an enormous problem, Zachary. We probably should have killed her.”

“Killed her? Just because your girlfriend thought it was okay to go for her throat at a live venue, in plain view!” Brian’s thick fist smashed heavily into the leather arm of the couch he was perched on as he growled dangerously. His slurring French lilt, however, was lousy for instigating threats, and Matt simply laughed at the brown-eyed guitarist.

“You knew as well as I that Valary was going to find it difficult to resist the girl. Johnny could hardly restrain himself from partaking in that little delicacy,” The singer’s voice was tinged with a dark Italian accent.

“That is not a problem now, Matthew. Kindly refrain from creating one. The problem at hand is not that Valary attacked Vivien, but that she must be taught out ways. Oh, and she is currently a threat to most humans. What shall we do about this?” If it had not been for the drummer’s intervention, Brian and Matthew would easily have come to blows

“Cancel the tour?” To Zachy, it seemed the most logical option; they could not let Vivien out of their sight and she would not be able to interact with humans without experiencing the blood lust for quite some times - and even then, she might have moments of weakness as Valary had.

“Absolutely not.”