Run Away - Kira Burke

Kira’s working on the last of the set of neutralization equations when the door opens. She can feel the stumbling thump of Mom’s heels in the entryway; she’s probably drunk again. There’s a second set of footsteps with her, but they’re lighter. She almost can’t feel them at all.
She’s curious enough to actually put the homework down on her desk and walk out into the kitchen/dining room/entryway of the cramped apartment. Normally she leaves Mom’s one-night stands to themselves. She doesn’t want to be there for that. She wants to pretend they don’t exist.
But she has no idea why this one’s steps don’t seem right. And something is telling her to find out. She walks into the dining room just in time to see the man (a big man, not at all the size she expected from the footsteps) slam her mother into the wall with a force that she can feel through her whole body.
He tilts her head to the side, and then leans in toward her neck. Kira sees something sparkle in his mouth. Gold tooth? The guy’s sick, he’s gonna leave Mom with the kind of marks she wears scarves for a week to cover.
She starts to turn around, and his head snaps toward her, eerily fast. Light glints off long white fangs and crimson eyes. Kira feels a snarl, like an angry dog, reverberate through the whole room. It shakes down into her stomach and makes her feel sick and terrified. This is something old. And bad. Very, very bad. Something instinct itself tells her to fear.
She doesn’t quite remember how she gets the serving silverware drawer open, or how her fingers find the silver fork that’s one of the few pieces they haven’t sold from the set Mom had from her wedding. But the metal is cold in her hand, and she feels empty and dangerous.
The man has his hand clenched around her mother’s neck. He’s choking her.
“Let her go.” Kira has no idea what her words sound like. Her hearing aids are back in her room, she took them out to do homework undisturbed by the neighbor who plays flute music at full volume all day, the one who does palm readings and card fortunes. The high pitch always messes with the microphone terribly.
She knows it’s not uncommon for things to get...rough. But Mom is clearly drunk. Really drunk. And then Kira sees the tiny red punctures on her neck.
The red floods her whole vision. Don’t touch her you sick freak.
“I said let her go!”
She doesn’t know how he’s in front of her so fast, but he is. She reacts on instinct, stabbing out with the fork in blind panic. He raises his arm to block her, impossibly fast, but then screams. Screams so loud and shrill she would swear she could hear it. An inhuman cry that shakes the walls and shatters glasses on the shelf. Kira stumbles back, watching in horrified shock as the man’s arm smokes. Wisps of white fog rise up around the tines of the fork, sending a scorched meaty odor into the air.
She pulls herself to her feet and runs past him to her mother. They have moments, if that. Mom, dazed, is starting to struggle to her feet, a livid red handprint around her throat. Kira yanks her into the hall, kicks the door shut, and runs.
The smell of burning incense stops her from racing straight for the fire exit. The neighbor with the flute music, is holding a meditation ceremony tonight, or so says the printed sign on her door (with the long streak in the middle that means she just did it on the crappy little printer in the lobby).
Connect with your spirit self and your destiny. Tonight only, Madame Valois teaches meditation.
That open door, she can make it to. But the feel of footsteps in the hall tells her she’ll never get to the stairs with Mom in tow. Kira grabs the door and yanks it open, throwing herself and Mom into the candlelit entryway before slamming the door closed behind her.
‘Madame Valois’ jumps up from behind a table, so fast she knocks her overly towering turban half off her head. Kira can’t tell what she’s saying, but she’s getting the gist that they’ve ‘disturbed the auras’ or something like that. Still, she feels relieved with that door closed. Isn’t the rule that they can't come in unless invited? If anyone will believe this, it’s Madame Valois. (or as the letters Kira's sometimes had to deliver from the wrong mailbox indicate, Malory Johnson).
“We need help,” Kira gasps. “There’s...a vampire.”
It sounds stupid when she feels the words pass her lips. Who in their right mind would possibly believe that? Even she hadn’t, not until she saw what happened when the silver touched him. Up till then, he’d been some guy with a freaky fetish and some pretty good contacts and fake fang dentures.
Madame Valois’s face goes instantly hard. Kira thinks they’re about to be chastised for ruining the meditation session and tossed back into the hall, but instead she’s pulled back toward a small bedroom crowded with crystals and smelling like herbs. The door is slammed closed, and she helps Mom sit down on the zodiac wheel-pattern bedspread. The only light in here is a salt lamp on a table, but Kira holds it as close as she can to Mom’s neck to inspect the injuries. The punctures aren’t bleeding, but they look deep.
This can’t be real. I’m going to wake up and it’s going to be a dream. I fell asleep on my textbooks. With that assignment on Dracula for English class on my mind. That’s all. This can’t be real. But the smell of burning skin still fills her nose, despite the clash of herbs in the room.
Five minutes later, the door opens. Madame Valois, minus the turban and plus some sort of beaded necklace, steps into the room. There’s a strong smell of garlic, and Kira wrinkles her nose.
HOW SHE? The woman asks in ASL, leaning over Mom to inspect the wounds.
U-N-C-O-N-S-C-I-O-U-S, Kira fingerspells back. Madame Valois doesn’t know a lot of sign, just enough to talk to Kira on the stairs when they see each other.
I MAKE HER TEA. GOOD FOR...Kira watches as the woman mimes the ‘V’ handshape sinking fangs into her neck. It’s not the real sign, but it’s good enough.
YOU BELIEVE ME? Kira doesn’t have to work for the physical markers that this is a question, not a statement. I DON’T KNOW IF I BELIEVE IT.
YOU SHOULD.
Kira takes a deep, shaky breath.
TEA GOOD FOR YOU TOO. Madame Valois walks away into the kitchen, and Kira follows, feeling the vibrations in the floor as the woman’s clunky-heeled shoes hit the tile. She fills a teapot and sets it on the stove, then reaches up into the cupboards. She grabs several little glass bottles with handwritten labels and begins shaking a bit of their contents into a small cheesecloth-looking bag.
The teakettle sends a stream of white fog into the air, and Madame Valois takes it off the heat and pours water over the little bag in a mug. Kira smells a lot of things in the steam as the mug is pressed into her hands, including an overpowering smell of garlic. Kira can’t tell if it’s from the tea or Madame Valois herself. A sip confirms that it is in fact in the tea.
She’s not familiar with the particulars of vampires, she’s always been more interested in sci-fi than horror. But she does know about garlic’s association with them.
Still, it feels a little ridiculous. She steps out of the kitchenette into the living room, plopping down on the couch next to the smoldering incense stick in its holder, looking at the table that without the pattered cloth from the meditation session over it, has coffee cup rings and shoe marks. There’s a pile of celebrity news magazines shoved hastily underneath, the stack toppling over.
Behind the illusion of mysticism, Madame Valois is a normal person. Maybe the guy in the apartment was too. Maybe he was just a creep with a weird fetish.
Magic is real, Kira knows that much. The fae are living proof, persecuted for their power and feared for their skill. She’s often wondered if Madame Valois is one, hiding in plain sight.
But still, believing in vampires...feels like a leap. Fae are living, breathing, mortal beings, the same as humans. But something neither dead nor alive...the logic problem of Schrödinger's cat pops into her head and she almost snorts her tea. I did not think this was going to be the practical application.
But there’s no denying what she saw. There’s no explaining away the burning skin when touched with silver. The two punctures on Mom’s neck. It all adds up.
She doesn’t realize she’s dropped her cup until the hot liquid splashes into her lap.
HURT? Madame Valois signs worriedly, as she grabs her discarded turban scarf to mop up the tea.
WHAT I SAW, I DON’T UNDERSTAND IT, Kira signs.
SOME THINGS F-A-K-E. SOME THINGS VERY REAL.
Kira nods, feeling like the whole room is sliding away from her in a long tunnel.
THIS I DO FOR S-H-O-W. PEOPLE BELIEVE, BUT ALL F-A-K-E. BUT SOME THINGS… Madame Valois stops. TRUE DARKNESS.
And Kira knows, as surely as she knows the chemical composition of hydrofluoric acid, that what she saw tonight was a vampire. The real thing.
Acid burns in Kira's stomach. This secret has been well kept for a long time, clearly. And that can't have happened by vampires letting escaped victims live out their lives in peace.
I know. He knows I know. He thinks Mom knows. He will kill us.
The only way she stops this equation from reaching its logical conclusion is to introduce an unknown variable. Herself.
If I kill him first, he can't kill us.
It's simple in her head. But she knows, like every chemical equation she's ever solved, it will be a whole lot messier in real life.
BOOKS? She signs. It’s less than coherent, but apparently Madame Valois understands, because she reaches for the shelf along the wall, fingering the volumes before pulling out three and handing them to Kira. She flips open the cover of the first one.
A Natural History of the Undead. The Vampire and its Habits.
It’s by someone called Anders Van Der Heide. She’s never heard the name.
D-R-A-C-U-L-A, YOU READ, FINISH? Madame Valois signs.
Kira shakes her head. START. NOT FINISH.
V-A-N H-E-L-S-I-N-G. REAL NAME.
Kira got that far. The Dutch doctor who actually knew of the existence of vampires intrigued her, he was applying the scientific method to the supernatural. He was going to be the subject of her essay.
It’s not the craziest thing she’s been asked to believe tonight.
She takes the book into the room with her mom, waiting for her to wake up and studying the almost 100 year old treatise on vampires.
By the time Mom stirs, bleary eyed, hungover, and very confused about why they’re in someone else’s apartment, Kira has a plan.
Just like vampires, she thinks in three-dimensional space, not the flat simplicity of strings of sentences on pages or muttered at mouth height. Her world is highs and lows, stacking and ordering, locations and spatial cues. She can step into their world, meet them on their own terms. Hearing or not, she can turn herself into a match for them and their shadowy existence.
She’s going to find the vampire who came for them. And then, she’s going to kill him.