Vampire University (Book One in the Vampire University Series) (16 page)

"Oh, nothing. It's just a prick. I just... well, I guess I expected it to heal up on you. There goes that theory. But didn't the cut on your neck heal?"

"What? This?" asked Taylor, pulling her collar down to show a long thin scab on her neck. "It's doing okay. It was just a scratch, really."

"Oh," said Hannah, frowning. "I guess I just assumed. Well there goes that theory."

"So no super healing then?"

"Maybe not. Here," said Hannah before sticking her thumb in her mouth.

She pulled it out again and it was wet with blood. Before Taylor could react, Hannah placed the bloody thumb on the spot that she had taken the blood sample from Taylor, leaving a bright red thumb print.

"There you go," said Hannah. "All better!"

She smiled and a thin stream of blood dribbled out of the corner of her mouth. She wiped it away absent-mindedly with the back of her hand.

"Did you just bite your tongue?" asked Taylor.

"Lip," said Hannah, swallowing. "We do it all the time. Drinking blood is sort of a messy affair for us. A little bit of our blood, a lot of theirs. Like I said, it's how we don't leave a mark."

"And that doesn't turn them into, you know, vampires?"

"Not normally, no. They have to be pretty well and drained for our blood to take over. Dead or near it, basically. So the careful vampire has nothing to fear!"

"And you're a careful vampire?"

Hannah placed her hand to her chest, feigning offense.

"Have you met me?" she said. "I'm careful about everything."

"Yeah, I see that. So now what?"

"Well, your arm seems to have healed up nicely. Here, let me get your neck, too."

Taylor dodged Hannah's thumb as it came towards her.

"Really, it's just a scratch. I'm not really keen on all this blood everywhere," said Taylor.

"Suit yourself. Well, I was really hoping to reanimate that frog, but I'm not so sure about the super-healing idea
anymore
."

"Vampire blood can reanimate dead frogs?"

"What? No. At least, I don't think so. I can't say that I've had the occasion to try that out. I just thought your blood might be a little more rule-bendy. But it doesn't appear to have any healing qualities at all."

"So basically you just took a needle full of my blood to prove what you could have learned from looking at my neck?"

"I guess so. We do have the microscope though. Hold on."

Hannah pulled out the microscope they had brought with them and plugged it in. She took the syringe and carefully squeezed a single drop from it onto a glass slide and gingerly placed it under the microscope. She looked intently into the eyepiece and fiddled with the knob back and forth. After a few minutes of this, she sat back looking defeated.

"Well?" asked Taylor.

"Well, to be honest, I don't really know what blood is supposed to look like. You know, microscopically. I was hoping it would... I dunno. Sparkle?"

"Have you ever looked at blood under a microscope before? You know, in the course of your illustrious floor-sweeping science career."

"No... Wait! I know! Let me compare it to mine."

With that she stuck her thumb in her mouth again and pulled it out covered in blood. She smeared this across another slide and looked into the microscope, again fiddling with the knob.

"Well?" asked Taylor.

"It looks the same, I'm afraid. Maybe we can get a teacher or someone to look at it for us."

"Is that really wise? I'd kind of like to not advertise my... unique circumstances."

"Oh I definitely agree. We'd just have to find a human and enthrall them, of course."

"Of course."

"Okay, well that was disappointing. What else... what else..." Hannah said, rubbing her thumb against her chin, absent-mindedly smearing it with blood. "Let's try a different approach. Let's see how you are with glamours."

"Well, we've established that I can see through them pretty well. Too well, in fact."

"Right right, but can you create them yourself?"

"I... have no idea. Can I?"

"Well let's find out, shall we?"

"It sounds preferable to bleeding, I'll give you that."

"Yeah, most things are, I hear."

"So what do I do?" Taylor asked.

"Here," said Hannah, pulling a pencil from her desk drawer and handing it to Taylor. "Try the rose thing."

Taylor took the pencil from Hannah's hand and held it out in front of her.

"So, now?" Taylor asked.

"This one's a little trickier to explain. You have to visualize the glamour as specifically as you can and think almost as if you believe the glamour is reality. Concentrate hard enough and your perspective will change," explained Hannah.

"Change? In what way?"

"It's one of those 'you know it when you see it' sort of things. It's a definite change though. You'll be able to tell the difference. Once your perspective changes, you can project that glamour onto the object. Got it?"

"Not at all."

"Right," said Hannah. "It takes time and a little practice. Just stare at the pencil."

Taylor did as she was instructed and focused as much as she could on the pencil in front of her.

"Great, now try to ignore everything but the pencil," said Hannah. "Well, that and me. Everything but me. And the pencil. But mostly ignore me and think about the pencil. Just listen to me, is what I'm saying, don't think about me."

"Uh, okay," said Taylor, trying to focus on the pencil.

"Now imagine that it's a rose and concentrate really hard."

"Okay," said Taylor, squinting slightly.

"Think about its shape and color. Think about the texture. Think about how it feels in your hand. How light it is. How firm the stem is and how soft the petals are."

Taylor tried to do just that. She imagined that it was a red rose, in full bloom. A single stem, with a thorn on the side. The petals would be soft, perhaps spattered with drops of dew. The petals would radiate from the center of the bloom, peeling away at the tips in a sloping curl, bound together where petals meet stem.

She imagined it, but nothing in front of her changed.

"Concentrate," said Hannah. "Do you feel the change?"

Taylor dropped the pencil out of frustration.

"No, I do not feel any changing."

"Well, don't get frustrated. It's possible that this is something you're not able to do and even if it is, I didn't get it on my first try either."

"Really?" said Taylor
,
looking up at
Hannah
.

"Okay, not really. But I'm a quick learner. Most people don't get it on their first try. Okay some people. I mean, I guess. I mean, it usually comes pretty naturally, but not always. Maybe it works different for you? In any case, just keep giving it a shot."

Hannah picked up the pencil and placed it back in Taylor's hand. With her other hand, Hannah closed Taylor's fingers around the pencil and held her hand reassuringly for a moment.

"Here. Why don't you practice while I go out for a bit?" said Hannah.

"Out? Where are you going?" asked Taylor. "I mean... I'm sor... I mean, it's not really any of my business."

"Oh don't worry. Just feeling a little peckish."

"Peckish?"

"It means hungry. Slang. British I think, but popular in the vampire community as well. Kind of evokes an image of puncturing don't you think?"

"Ew," said Taylor.

"Right, sorry. You're not a big blood person. I forget. Anyway, that's just something I need to attend to. Don't worry, I won't hurt anybody."

"I don't worry about you, Hannah."

"It's okay to worry, Taylor. The world is not a safe place and especially not for people like you and me. But as long as you've got me, I'll see what I can do to make it just a little bit safer for you."

"Thanks Hannah. I... appreciate it."

"Say no more!" Hannah replied cheerfully and then slipped out the door.

Taylor looked at the pencil in her hand and pulled out the pencil that Hannah had glamoured before. She stared at both of them and filled her mind with images of roses but nothing changed. She still had in her hands two ordinary pencils. Frustrated, she put them both away and did her best to think of something else.

—
-

The next day, Taylor again woke up entirely too early for her liking to the sounds of Hannah's soft breathing. Hannah must have come in late, as she was not there when Taylor had gone to bed. Taylor was usually a light sleeper, so Hannah must have been exceptionally quiet. Taylor recalled the times when Hannah had masked their conversations with what she said was a glamour and Taylor wondered if she had somehow used that ability to mask her sound coming in as well.

Taylor wondered how you would go about visualizing an absence of sound and couldn't quite make sense of the idea. Then again, she hadn't been able to grasp how to create an optical illusion either. Remembering the pencils from yesterday, she pulled her cell phone out from under the corner of her bed and used its light to locate her desk. She pulled out the two pencils. She still could not tell the difference. One supposedly had a glamour on it, but she couldn't for the life of her tell which one it was.

She lay back in bed and stared at them thinking about roses in every possible shape, size, and hue that she could think of, but nothing changed. She must have kept at this for what felt like at least an hour, or perhaps she had fallen back asleep, but she was jolted back to attention by the light turning on in the room. She looked at the time and several hours had passed. It was now 8 AM.

"Wake up, sleepy head. Another busy day ahead!" said Hannah.

Taylor looked around for the pencils and found them on the floor beside her bed. They still looked decidedly like pencils. She grabbed them both and dropped them into her bag before setting off down the hall to the bathroom to get ready for the day.

-15-

Taylor and Hannah ate breakfast together again, but did not run into either of the brothers, much to Taylor's relief. Hannah chattered away about people they had met at school and the sights around campus and Taylor did her best to politely pay attention, though she kept thinking back to her attempts at glamours. Not really knowing how to make glamours happen, she found herself trying to will random objects into other random objects. She spent as much time trying to imagine her spoon as other things
—
a flower, a fork, a twig
—
as she did eating her cereal with it, but she found that splitting her attention between Hannah and the spoon resulted in her being not entirely successful in paying attention to either of them.

Hannah did not seem to notice, or least she didn't mind, and the spoon didn't seem to be worse for wear, so Taylor tried not to concern herself too much about it. When Hannah suggested that they go visit the library, Taylor was too distracted to object, though she didn't really see the point of touring the library when she was trying to figure out whether or not she had super powers. Somehow, homework for a freshman orientation class didn't seem quite as important as figuring out her identity.

Still, she followed along agreeably, even when Hannah insisted that they follow the self-guided tour instructions to the letter, which involved wearing goofy headphones and carrying an oversized cassette recorder as they followed the voice-over instructions that played through them. Taylor didn't think they made cassettes still, but given the worn look of the equipment they were given, it didn't appear that they had been acquired any time recently.

She felt slightly self-conscious walking around the building so clearly being the new person, but as classes hadn't started yet there were few students to notice. Still, she didn't like being the obvious freshman, so she focused on keeping up with Taylor and used every opportunity she could to try to glamour random objects.

Having had not much luck with the visual illusions, she tried imagining all kinds of sounds around them. Singing books and shrieking desks filled her imagination, but to her disappointment all she could ever hear was the droning voice on the cassette, occasionally interrupted by a tone that indicated they were supposed to pause until they reached the next destination on their tour.

Taylor was never quite paying close enough attention to where they were supposed to be headed next, so she just followed Hannah's lead. That seemed as good a plan as any, at least so far. Meanwhile, Hannah scribbled notes at every stop, far more than Taylor felt could possibly be necessary, so she was not overly concerned that she would be missing anything that Hannah couldn't make up for.

The tour concluded uneventfully. At no point did they see anything interesting, though Taylor would admit that the bar on what was interesting to her had been significantly raised in the past week. And much to Taylor's chagrin, at no point did the books break out into chorus, despite her best attempts.