As The Blood Is Drained, It's Bad For Business

I skate to the entrance of the local grocery store and kick up my skateboard, holding it against my side with my right arm. I swiftly move past the automatic doors and make my way to Register 7, where Matthew is working.

“Twinnie!” I yell, making every cashier stop what they’re doing to look at me. I smile cleverly.

“Sorry guys, just Mattie,” I say even louder. The cashiers go back to work. I coyly stand by Matthew behind the register. He’s ringing up about ten different boxes of tampons. Lovely.

“What do you want,” he mumbles, his head down, still ringing up...feminine products. I sigh and put on my ‘serious face’.

“Mom is...incapacitated.” Mattie immediately looks up, dropping a box behind the register. The lady buying an unusual amount of scented cotton taps her foot. Matthew picks up the box and continues ringing up products. He develops a systematic pattern: look at me, look at the register, look at me, look at the register.

“What happened now?” he asks, hiding the panic that’s creeping up his throat.

“What do you think?” I answer. He nods his head.

“Excuse me, but I’d like to pay before I’m dead,” the customer in front of the register says. I look at her skeptically.

“Oh shut it, you’re just PMSing...a lot, apparently. Damn, woman.” I smirk and hold back the urge to not burst out laughing. The woman and Matthew both look at me incredulously, and this time I do laugh.

“Aw come on Mattie, you were thinking it.” He says nothing as he gives the lady her receipt. She storms off.

“Now,” I begin, “I was wondering if you could come home early tonight, because we need to tend to Miss Passed-Out-On-The-Couch and I can’t cook worth shit.” Mattie groans.

“Mind your manners, miss,” says a little old lady now at the register; she’s buying bread and cheese. I roll my eyes.

“Sorry,” I grumble. I start to head for the exit but yell back to Matthew.

“Remember, help!”

I checked to make sure my weapons were in place, skipping over the concealed ones. I closed my eyes and mentally prepared myself for the fight. The trick to winning a fight is to block all pain out of your mind. If the hits you take don’t faze you, they can’t do as much harm.

Meanwhile, Jackie stood silent. We agreed that she would not use weapons; she had no need for them. It would only give her an advantage. I opened my eyes and stared straight into Jackie’s violet ones. She grinned, showing her fangs. I bit my tongue and hid the grimace that I desperately wanted to spread across my face. Jackie cocked her head.

“You take forever,” she teased. I scowled.

“Well what are you waiting for?” I encouraged. She shrugged her shoulders.

“You asked for it,” she warned; I laughed and immediately pulled out two daggers from my back pocket. I threw them at her chest with a blatant fury. It felt good to fight again. Jackie dodged my daggers and they drove themselves straight into the adjacent wall. She darted around the room in a blur, trying to make it impossible for me to track her. Luckily, I’ve had about a year of experience watching vampires use this trick. It’s the oldest one in the book. While it may look like they’re everywhere at once, they really only move in a triangular formation, rotating to three different spots. If you watch them and calculate their movements correctly, you can predict where they are going to go next.

I watched her triangulate her movements; three, two, one, three, two, one. Easy. She circled counter-clockwise around me until I finally took out a dagger and sliced her stomach. The blade was laced with poison, like most of my daggers were.

“Aggh!” Jackie cried. Because of the velocity at which she was running, my blade threw her off-balance and slammed her into a wall. Swords that were hanging above clattered around her and the drywall cracked and shattered. Jackie lay there in a heap on the floor, clutching her stomach. I smirked.

“Now you and Cayden can have matching scars,” I teased. She growled and slowly stood up, regardless of her bleeding stomach. Her shirt was now drenched in a cocktail of her various human bloods.

“I was going easy on you,” she said through her teeth. I smiled widely.

“Uh-huh. Then show me what you really got,” I egged her on. She stuck her tongue out, like little children do, but complied with my request. She came at me head-on, using all the speed she could possibly hold within her petite body. Unfortunately for her, her anger and the pain from her newly acquired wound clouded her mind. I immediately stabbed another poisoned blade into Jackie’s hand as she lamely tried to block my strike. She bit her lip and hissed like a cat, and I just laughed.

“Come on, you’re a fucking vampire, for heaven’s sake. I would assume you’d at least scratch me.” Her eyes glowed violet and it was like I flipped a switch. Her body position became more erect, her eyes snapped into an ‘in-the-zone’ kind of look. I came to attention as I watched her run circles around me, invisible and fierce. I struggled to unhook another dagger from my lower back, but the clasp wouldn’t come undone. As Jackie was still flitting around me, I felt a rip on the place where I was trying to get my dagger.

Jackie had taken my weapon.

“Hey!” I objected, but couldn’t really come to a logical explanation for why she needed to give it back. I reached to unhook other weapons, but to no avail. She ripped and ripped until I was left with nothing but my clothes. Can you say ‘uncomfortable’? I panned my vision across the room, looking for a weapon in reach that I could use. Too late. Jackie reached her arm out and pressed her tiny hand against my neck. The hold that she had on me was impossibly strong, and she pinned me down to the ground. I put my left hand on her hand, trying to get her off of me; no use. With my right hand I reach out across the floor as far as I could and tried to grasp one of the various weapons around me. My neck was sore-I was coughing and sputtering, not even fully recovered yet from when Daniel had been strangling me.

“How does it feel?” Jackie said calmly, looking into my eyes, “how does it feel to know that you’re expendable? That you’re right under death’s grip right now? That I could kill you just because I want to?” In response, I just gagged. This scene was all too familiar. Luckily, I reached for the tip of a long-handled knife. Without thinking of where I was aiming, I threw it as hard as I possibly could. The weapon grazed past Jackie’s head and zoomed towards the vampire that had just opened the door.

Cayden stood before us. With a flick of the wrist, he caught the knife by the blade and set it down on the floor. There wasn’t a scratch on him.

“Jackie, let her go.” He commanded. She released her grip on my neck, as her boyfriend had done only the night before. I coughed once and sprang to my feed, ready for action but weaponless.

“Scarlett.” Cayden said in a hushed tone, and we all stood still as stone. My name sounded musical when he said it, a song long forgotten by time. I looked back at him and, for the moment, I couldn’t be repulsed. I just wanted to know what he was up to. His gaze never left mine. Even though Jackie said I wasn’t going to be seeing him a lot, I sure thought it seemed like he was everywhere. Cayden took steps toward me and took my hand in his, leading me out of the room. I cringed, and he opened his mouth to pour out another bar of music.

“It’s time you knew the truth.”