Scarlet Prison

Chapter 28

***Warning: This chapter contains R rated content. Proceed at your own discretion. This chapter is not intended for young audiences. If you have any questions about it, feel free to message me!***

           

Thursday's bloodletting didn't leave me feeling as weak as the last couple of weeks had, but I still saved the pint of blood, just in case. I now had four bags of my own blood residing in my fridge, and I gazed at them, wondering if vampire habits could rub off onto humans. I had this underlying instinct that they would come in handy somehow. Blood was useful, wasn't it? I could offer it as a snack to visiting vampires. I could line up the bags to hide the food in my fridge. I could sell it for extra money. I could use it as paint to decorate my walls. Or I could use it as my very own blood bank in the case that I was to suffer substantial blood loss.

This last possibility made me shudder, but I had to be realistic about the risks of living with vampires. Even if they didn't try to drink my blood, violence was a common occurrence in this city. Most of it wasn't viewed as a problem because vampires could heal quickly, even from wounds that would be fatal to most humans. Occasionally vampires were found dead though, the killer untraceable from the scene. These deaths hardly worried anyone because vampires had a universal custom of viewing themselves as invincible. They just wrote off the deaths as a result of the victim's own stupidity, as they swam in their nice river of denial. They didn't believe that something as silly as death could ever claim them. As a human, I suffered from no such illusion.

In spite of my worries, my life had been surprisingly calm the last few days, since the incident with Dominik. He'd been mysteriously absent from my life, which I'd only just discovered was due to some sort of heated political discussion. He was busy making speeches, attending panels, and dealing with political rallies. I found this out when I came home from work that night, and, before going upstairs to drain my blood, I saw him speaking on the TV hanging above the bar. The news showed him at various events, looking like he had never been stabbed or bitten. I wasn't surprised that he had healed quickly, but it was a little disconcerting to see him going about his day as if nothing had happened. He seemed to have bigger problems on his hands than me. Good. I didn't stay to see anything beyond this. I didn't want to think about him anymore. He freaked me out more than I was willing to admit. I had this eerie feeling that he was hunting me, rather than courting me. Maybe the feeling stemmed from the natural instincts that existed between vampires and humans, but I almost felt like it went beyond that.

I shoved the blood aside and pulled out a carrot. For a ridiculous moment, I considered taking the carrot as food for the road on the way to see Ekai. Then I imagined the looks on vampires' faces as I strolled by, eating a carrot. I laughed at myself for thinking of doing such a thing.

The impulse probably came from an old habit Novashi and I used to share. With my tendency to run late, I often didn't have time to eat before needing to leave. In elementary school, Carmell drove us to school in the mornings. Even though I never complained about my hunger, she figured out that I'd been skipping breakfast. Both Carmell and Novashi firmly believed that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Breakfast gets your metabolism going, they'd explain. If you don't eat it, you're sure to get fat.

One morning, when I clambered into the car, shoelaces still untied and my hair sculpted by my pillow, Carmell twisted around in her seat and handed me a carrot. I accepted the carrot without really thinking and looked from it to Novashi, who was shyly picking at her fingernails. What was I supposed to do with it? Did Carmell want me to hold it for her the whole way to school?

Carmell glanced at me in the rearview mirror. "It's your breakfast, sweetie," she said.

I looked at her like she was insane. "Vegetables are not breakfast food." My dad had a special dish he liked to make on the weekends that involved slicing potatoes into strips, dipping them into an egg mixture, frying them, and then smothering them with syrup and cinnamon. He called it "Double French Fries." That was real breakfast food.