leant over Patrick to touch his chest with a lingering, gentle caress.
Images of the world fading, of Patrick fading. Everything turning dark, darker.
Those terrible, vivid images had dragged him under and he’d stared at his parents and brother in horror, his hand going to his neck, his fingers finding the twin puncture wounds below his right ear.
“Great,” he’d muttered. “How the bloody hell am I going to go surfing now?”
The sarcastic, bitter thought had undone him. Something he loved more than life, robbed of him. Taken from him. He was a vampire. No longer able to walk in the sunlight. No longer able to consume regular food. Needing to feed on blood to survive. He’d stared at the toast in his hand, the Vegemite smeared over its warm, crusty surface filling him with such a bitter surge of nostalgic anger he’d thrown it against his mother’s wallpapered wall and stormed from the room, a new, indefinable hunger growing in his gut. An undeniable hunger.
An unspeakable hunger.
Pat had caught up with him, as fast as always, faster than a teenage kid should be able to move, just as he was about to sprint down his parents’ driveway.
“Hey!” His brother had grabbed his arm, spun him about.
“Go away, Pat,” Ven had growled, trying to shrug him off. “You don’t want to be near me now.”
“What’s the big deal?” Pat had asked with a shrug, his eighteen-year-old face open and completely without guile, his green eyes somehow luminous in the dark night. Glowing with an emotion Ven recognized so very well. Love. “So we just hit the waves at night, that’s all.”
That had been the end of the discussion. Neither he nor Pat had raised his transformation again, not in a serious way, at least. And his parents, God love them, hadn’t either. His mum had come to visit to his home the second night of his new existence, hefting a big bag of black-out curtains she’d made on her ancient Janome, hanging them over his windows as she chatted about the research she’d been doing on the differences between A negative and B positive. And his dad… Well, Steven Patrick Watkins had continued on as he always did. Not speaking two words when one would do, letting his first born son settle into his new “life” with nothing more than a nod and a refusal to stock garlic on the pantry shelves. Oh, and a perverse insistence of shoving any corny B-grade vampire movie he could find in the DVD player whenever Ven dropped around.
And that had been the way of things for many years. Ven soon discovered the joys of his newfound physical prowess and made full use of them, feeding only from Sydney’s many women eager to become a vampire’s feed source, enjoying the other “perks” that came with the willingly offered dinner. One night he’d met Amy Mathieson at a particularly rowdy game of beach volleyball and three years later, he was pretty much a monogamous feeder.
He’d never questioned the “rules”, those unexplained, completely annoying rules dictated to him by Hollywood. Don’t go out in the daylight—there went the day job. Don’t go near garlic—even though garlic prawns had been his favorite meal. Don’t try to imbibe human food—again with the garlic prawns. Avoid crucifixes and holy water—okay, no real problem there. Don’t get yourself stabbed in the heart by a wooden stake—splinters on steroids to be avoided at all cost. Gotcha. He just accepted those rules as he had his new existence. With a wry grin and dry sarcasm.
Fortunately, being staked to dust had never been a problem. The city’s small number of, quite frankly, laughable demon hunters never bothered with him. And as for the rest of the “rules”, well, he kept to them, crucifixes and holy water the least of his concerns. His family had never been much for religion and they weren’t likely to start any day soon. He didn’t think his folks even kept a Bible in the house.
But the images of his transformation refused to leave him, haunting him when he “slept”, forcing him to relive the moment over and over again. The fear, the pain, the fury, the bliss of Death’s icy touch…and an empty longing for the life stolen from him. A life of light and warmth and sun—surfing or jogging with Pat, fishing from the rocks at North Bondi, sitting on the beach watching the waves make love to the sand.
A life he thought lost to him forever. Until an