Page 29 of Missing Moon
“These ones might be.” Tammy reaches her hand out from under the blanket to wipe at her face. “Did this one talk or just growl before it exploded?”
“Called me a bitch.” I shrug. “He hadsomeintelligence. But I doubt it had any idea what I was, though. Must’ve thought I was an ordinary mortal.”
“Boy did he get the shock of his unlife,” says Anthony.
“Briefly, yes.” I take a deep breath and let it out slow.
When I was a kid, staring at my ceiling in hopes of finding answers never worked. Now, though… it kinda does. But the answers aren’t coming from the ceiling; rather, from my psychic feelers. A blank white surface serves essentially like a meditative tool to help clear my mind. Yeah, I get the feeling Tammy is right. Depending on how much of a ‘movie vampire’ that guy was, there could be a whole nest of them somewhere in the area. Perhaps living in nearby caves, like the boys inLost Boys.
“Whoa! You don’t have a computer in your room,” says Tammy.
Anthony laughs. “They didn’t have computers when Ma was a kid.”
“Shush, you two.” I roll my eyes. “I’m notthatold. They had computers… we just didn’t, not in this house. And… most kids didn’t have their own back then, either. A few kids in my class had them, but it was like a ‘family computer’ that everyone shared.”
“Wow.” Tammy fake shivers. “How did they ever deal with that?”
“Probably the same way we dealt with telephones attached to the wall with cords,” I add.
“Barbaric,” says Tammy in a sarcastic tone before going serious. “So, how much crap did you just step in?”
“Good question. Something ‘strange’ is going on around here.” I stare deeply into the blank ceiling above me, feeling my thoughts swirl and coalesce into a strong opinion. “Got a real strong sense this is only the beginning.”
“Greeeeat.” Tammy yawns. “Well, at least we won’t be bored.”
Chapter Eleven
The Problem with Bloodlines
So… the kids are asleep.
Me, not so much.
Hi, ceiling. Been a while. To say that lying in my old bed in my old room at my parents’ house is a surreal feeling is putting things mildly. I’m not sure if it’s because the whole vampire thing happened to me or if I’m just being weird... but it doesn’t seem like much time has passed at all. For a fleeting moment, it’s tempting to think everything from the day I left for college to coming back here to say farewell to by father has been a crazy ass dream that woke me up in the middle of the night… and in three hours, I’ll be trudging off to class at the high school.
Thinking about my childhood gets me thinking about Mom. I know ‘motherhood’ isn’t some hard-wired absolute thing in our brains and there are horrible mothers out there. Mom never actively did anything bad toward us kids. The more I think about it, the more I feel guilty because she’s obviously suffering from something.
In hindsight, I no longer believe she ignored us because she wasn’t interested in us or had better things to do. I’d say shemight be legitimately crazy but… Anthony mentioned she has no soul. Dusk told us he thought he saw her doing magic when he was little. Magic runs in my bloodline, right? That doesn’t mean it’s only me. It’s my entire family. Could Mom have been practicing magic in secret? Did she screw something up that resulted in her present condition?
Within seconds of me wondering this, a strong sensation of vertigo washes over me. For an instant, it feels like the bed beneath me has stopped existing. I fall straight downward into darkness. Above me, the white rectangle of my bedroom ceiling rockets off, shrinking and spinning until it’s gone from view.
Eerie black-and-white trees appear around me out of nowhere. I find myself hovering in the air, twice my height above the ground, surrounded by forest. The freakiest part of this is howdarkit looks. Yes, I’m serious. That’s freakier to me than falling down through my bed into a crazy woodland environment. I haven’t seen real darkness for fourteen years. Being a vampire is like having permanent night vision goggles bolted onto my skull. Except… I don’t experience the ‘everything is green’ thing. It’s all in color, just sort of muted. Hues are much more vibrant in the light. That’s about the only way I can tell if it’s dark or not, is how washed out or bright the colors look.
Anyway… it’s dark.
That’s weird.
I look up past the tops of towering trees at a starless expanse of infinite blackness. I am mostly sure this is not real. For one thing, if I actually did fall downward through the bed, Tammy would be freaking the hell out. For another thing, being able to pass through solid matter is not one of my special powers. No, this has to be some sort of vision.
If so, what am Iseeing?
I float around, having a little bit of control over myself here. Motion amounts to drifting lazily in any particular direction. Can’t seem to make myself go down or up, though. While I’m trying to figure out how to navigate, I catch sight of something moving in the distance. Okay, it seems important. I lean toward it and try to propel myself forward, waving my arms like I’m swimming in the air.
Something ghostly a hundred yards away glides among the trees.
I chase after the apparition, which gradually becomes clearer and clearer as a human form. Pursuing it soon feels easier. I’m moving faster, so this is clearly what my psychic senses want me to see. Going in the wrong direction is extremely difficult. Picking up speed, I chase the spirit for a few minutes before arriving in a narrow clearing with a creek running through it.
The spirit looks to be a woman somewhere between thirty and forty. Her clothing and hair scream Eighties. That was the decade where humanity collectively went through more hairspray than they did in the sixties, seventies, and nineties combined.