Bloodline | Maknae Line (21+)

5:

Chapter 5:

A week later, things had settled back down in your life. You went back to class and resumed your two jobs as a barista in the morning and a waitress in the afternoons and evenings. Selena and Katie remembered nothing from the weekend besides the club, which was both scary and relieving. You had no idea how you could explain anything that had happened, but the vampire compulsion had done the job for you. Everything had seemingly gone back to normal.

Except for you. You weren't the same anymore. Even as you diligently went to class, did your homework and worked your shifts, something felt different. Perhaps it was just the knowledge of the existence of vampires, or the fact that you were part vampire. You wondered how many vampires were hanging around you and your friends all the time. They could be anywhere because they didn't have any discerning features besides their red eyes when they fed on people. Granted, there probably weren't many of them wandering around in the day time, since according to Jimin they didn't like the sun very much, and yet you still wondered.

You started to think about your parents and the horrible childhood you'd had, bouncing from foster home to foster home for years until finally graduating high school. For the longest time, you'd been so angry at the world for being abandoned. And you were angry at yourself for blaming your parents for abandoning you when you knew that they'd died because of an accident. It hadn't been their fault, and yet you still harbored feelings of anger and resentment toward them.

And now...

Now, you found out that they hadn't died in an accident but had been brutally murdered by a vampire. There was finally someone to blame. But you had no details, no particulars about any of it. All you could do was take the word of Lazarus the Elder. You didn't know anything about Lazarus besides what you'd been told. How could you possibly know if he was telling the truth?

Perhaps all of this had been a strange drunken nightmare and you had just gone a little crazy. It wasn't too out of the blue. You had been working your ass off for years, so it was entirely possible that you had a few screws loose and you'd imagined the whole thing. Imagined the red eyes, the blood, the pain of the vampire's teeth sinking into your flesh...

You jerked awake in a cold sweat, the image of red eyes and sharp fangs still clouding your vision. You shook your head, banishing the remainder of the nightmare and looked over at your phone to see that you had woken up an hour earlier than you'd set your alarm. You climbed out of bed, not too eager to fall back asleep into the nightmares, and instead went to your bathroom to take a quick shower to get rid of the sweat from your nightmare-plagued sleep.

As you changed into your barista uniform, you checked your neck in the mirror, glad to see that the bite marks were practically invisible unless you stared really hard. You'd been covering the wound with makeup all week and you were glad that you didn't have to be so vigorous with it anymore.

As you packed up your backpack with your binders and notebooks for your three classes today, you packed some sharpened number 2 pencils in the top compartment of your backpack and even stashed a few in your belt. You had started to do this every day, just in case. You were pretty sure that stabbing a vampire with a pencil wasn't the best method of repelling them, but at least it was better than nothing at all. At the very least, it made you feel better.

You walked into the living room of the apartment and jumped in surprise when you saw Katie sitting at the kitchen counter, a wine bottle sitting in front of her that was halfway empty. You furrowed your eyebrows as she turned to face you, her eyes baggy and haunted.

"Katie? Are you okay? Why are you up so early?"

"I never went to sleep." She said with a delirious smile, her speech heavily slurred. You sighed, checked your watch, and then moved toward her. You swiped her wine away, ignoring her moan of protest, corked it, and put it back in the fridge.