I don’t think the ghost led me the right way. Nothing I’ve seen has been recognizable. Although to be fair, when I first came down here, I was very distracted by the candles, the mist, and the Angel himself. I don’t think I’d necessarily recognize the route back to the residence wing.
I try sniffing the air to determine the right direction, but my sense of smell has never been as acute as that of other vampires. A result of the way I was turned, maybe.
The way I was turned…
As soon as the memory hits, I shut it down. I can’t afford to lose my shit.
“Ghost?” I call out. “Hello? You lost me. Can you come back?”
I’m not sure the ghost can even hear me, or that she would listen. True, she obeyed the Angel, but he’s technically her boss, being the god of the dead and all. I’m just a random woman.
When no one answers my call, I move forward along the dark hallway. I stumble on a sliver of broken concrete, but I right myself and step forward again—only for my foot to plunge into a void.
A startled scream tears from my throat. I try to catch myself with my claws, but they only graze the edge of the pit as I fall. I’m not too concerned—I can climb like a cat, and once I hit the bottom, I’ll just crawl back up—
But even as the plan flashes through my mind, my bodycrunchesonto something, and horrific pain bursts through my torso as a spiked object punches through my chest cavity. I choke, unable to scream or breathe, skewered like a moth on a pin.
My fingers fumble around the circumference of the object. I think it’s a large segment of broken pipe or a very thick piece of rebar. It’s larger in girth than my arm, piercing my back to the right of my spine and emerging beneath my right breast. Blood flows from thewound—I can hear it dripping from my back onto the distant floor somewhere below.
I’m facing upward, arched in midair, drenched in pitch-blackness. My breath hisses through my teeth as I extend my arms, then my legs, trying to find a surface against which I can push or any type of leverage to get myself off this damn thing. I can’t touch any walls, and it sounds like the floor of this pit is too far below me to be of help.
Tears slide from the corners of my eyes along my temples. Again I gingerly touch the thick piece of metal emerging from my torso. It’s long, slick with blood. Maybe if I can get a grip on it, I can pull myself up and off the end. I grit my teeth and groan, straining to slide my body up the pipe, even a few inches. But my fingers slide in the blood, and I drop back, losing the ground I gained, letting out a hiss of pain.
If I can un-impale myself, I’ll heal quickly. The greater danger lies in the blood loss I’m suffering while I’m stuck here. The pipe or rebar must have nicked something important, because my precious blood supply is pouring out of me much too fast.
I want to scream for help, but my lungs aren’t working properly. Something is wrong with the right one, and I can’t get enough air to really project my voice.
“Angel,” I call out, but the word ends in a sob.
The only answer is silence and the quick drip-drip-dripping of my blood.
I haven’t had to face my own mortality like this in a very long time. Vampires are a recent resurgence in the supernatural world, ever since a geneticist screwed around with a combination of terminal test subjects, animal DNA, and mythical relics. Theoretically, we should be able to live for centuries if we’re careful. But we can be killed. My parents are proof of that. They joined Wolfsheim ina crusade against some new type of vampire, and the new vampires killed them. Tore off their heads, according to the Progeny member who gave me the news.
My parents gave up everything to become vampires and to please Wolfsheim. But before they ever gave their lives for him, they sacrificed their children.
Usually, a person’s brain loses the distinct memory of a face over time, but I can still remember my siblings’ faces, even though I never saw them again after my eighth birthday. My parents destroyed every photo of them. Wiped my brother and sister from existence. Yet I can still see Thomas and Edith in my head, as clearly as I did the day we were told about the change. Their faces appear to me now, floating in the dark, bright and clear as if they were being projected in high resolution.
I never see them happy and smiling. They appear to me as they were near the end, their faces contorted with violent agony, silent screams distending their mouths, blood vessels bursting in their eyes, trickles of dark liquid leaking from their nostrils.
The classic way of turning a human into a vampire through blood exchange is brutal. The transformation process is so hard on the body that only a small percentage of people survive it. Most people’s bodies break down once their DNA starts rewriting itself. Others simply can’t endure the agony of growing the new organs.
My parents survived the process together. Maybe they thought their bloodline was special, that their children would also survive. Whatever the reason, they decided to turn their offspring early on instead of waiting until they were teens or adults. Another member of the Progeny had turned his son at age five, and the boy grew and developed normally. What a gift, my parents thought, to acclimate to vampirism from an early age, to enjoy eternity as a family.
Progeny headquarters was far from Nashville, and my parents only visited a few times in person, but they listened to Wolfsheim’s private podcast every week and applied his teachings with fervent devotion in their own twisted way.
Only once did they ever veer from his path. They didn’t ask for his permission before turning all three of their children impulsively one night, when I was eight, Thomas was five, and Edith was four.
I don’t think they had ever told the Progeny how many children they had. When it was over, they pretended like I was the only one.
TheChosen.
As a former band member, my father was skilled at keeping his personal life private. We had been an isolated and reclusive family unit for a long time, so when Thomas and Edith disappeared, no one questioned it. The week after they died, we moved to a new neighborhood and a new school district. If anyone ever did investigate further, I’m sure my father took care of it.
The way I feel right now, helpless and damaged, agonized and alone in a dark pit, is a dim reflection of my torment in the weeks and months after my siblings died. I will never be able to express the gut-twisting grief, the pain, and the horror of justexistingwith them gone. It fucked me up, tore wounds in my heart that will never heal.
From that point on, I feared everyone, even family, because the two people who were supposed to protect us essentially murdered my siblings and then acted like it was destiny. Like it was meant to be. Like I was the only child they were fated to have after all.
And I had to hide what I really felt, because they might turn on me and destroy me, too. That mistrust and terror, combined with the guilt I experienced whenever I started to enjoy something or express something—it’s the root of my performance anxiety. The reason I couldn’t sing for anyone for years.
