“Do you know where it comes from?” said Milch in a croak.
“Sorry?”
“The blood, girl, the blood! Do you know where it’s from?”
“I guess...” started Amanda and then hesitated. “Is it not from the blood banks?”
“That’s what they’d have us believe, yes. And what do you always hear on adverts for those things, and from your friends at the school?”
“Look, I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”
“Just answer the questions. You said that this was on my terms; just wait for it and answer the questions!”
“Okay,” said Amanda, concerned that the man would once again throw up his defences and force her to go without telling her anything. “I suppose they always say that they need more, that there’s a shortage.”
“And like every other one of your kind, I guess you know what it costs? It’s not cheap, is it? But how often do you hear of attacks that result from people not being able to pay? Almost never! Anyone of you who has even a little self-worth left in you goes down to the Tunnels. We all know the hunger comes on in time; sure you can be tempted, but you can stop yourself for a while. And, if you do run out of blood, you can hold out long enough to call someone from the school to pick you up and take you away. So don’t you see, my attacker couldn’t have just have been wandering around the fields one day only to feel as if he needed a snack. Sure, there are dozens of attacks, but we all know that most of them are not done by the hungry and poor. When the man who gave me this half-life first grabbed me, he had no idea what he was doing. As soon as he regained possession of himself after satisfying his hunger, he wilted and stopped feeding. He even started to cry.”
Despite his slightly rambling way of getting to his point, Amanda realised that there was something to what Milch had to say.
“Did you ever tell this to anyone else?”
“I told those miserable bastards time and time again, at that school and everywhere else. They all say the same thing. It’s impossible for anyone to escape.”
***
Glad to be out of the forest and away from the damp smell of dead animal that lingered in Milch’s clearing, Amanda took a moment after entering the car park to let herself adjust back to the human world. The empty plastic bottles, crushed cans and sodden, shredded papers that had been blown over to the edge of the car park helped to some extent, as did the tired looking shopping complex. However, the strange image of Milch, among his dead, would not move from Amanda’s mind and made her feel more like a vampire than ever before. He was in some ways closer in his life to the people who worked in the buildings around her than she would ever be again. If the man was not so stubborn, she saw no reason why Milch would not be able to return to live a mostly normal life among them. What was worse, this meant that she was probably more like Packard than she would like to think. She shuddered, closed her eyes, and pushed this thought out of her consciousness by thinking about how the evening had left her in desperate need of a shower.
“You’re out late.”
Amanda opened her eyes to find, standing right in front of her, three of the teenage boys who she had seen hiding away from the rain earlier on. All three were wearing the sorts of hooded tops and low-hanging, blue jeans that Amanda assumed had gone out of fashion before she had even entered the Tithonus school. None of them were dressed for the weather, and one seemed to have even ended up in a puddle as he was wet through, splattered with something like mud and holding himself to keep warm. Though she wished it was otherwise, something told her that the boy who had addressed her had played at least some part in his friend’s condition of being on the way to developing hypothermia. She hoped she was wrong.
“What the hell do you want?” snapped Amanda without really thinking.
“Alright, no need for that!” said the boy as he took one step closer to Amanda. “We’re just, you know, wondering what a pretty bird like yourself is doing hanging around our car park in the dark.”
One of the other boys let out a short snigger, which was quickly curtailed by a sharp look from the leader of the little pack. The leader, who was more than a head taller than Amanda, recomposed himself, stretched a grin over his teeth and moved a little closer to Amanda again. He said something else, but Amanda heard nothing of it as a familiar feeling was starting to take hold of her. She vaguely recalled, through a clouding consciousness, the sweet taste of blood that Packard had given her several hours before, the only drink that she had had all day. The idea of the blood that was coursing through the boy just before her caused her to salivate and part of her thrilled at the possibility that his life force was hers to take.
She scrunched her eyes closed in a vain attempt to maintain self-control, and as the sound of the boy’s voice was drowned out in her ears by a fear brought on by shards of experiences from her past life and the notion of what her vampire body might do to protect itself, she did not realise how close the boy was getting to her. That was until she felt his still damp hooded shirt press against her. In a single motion, it was all over. Without fully
