Better off Red – Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE

“I can offer you a ride.”
Lysette thought. She shifted uncomfortably. It was dark and she was cold. She was used to this and she didn’t mind it. But she wasn’t moving, she wasn’t turning away. Against all odds she was standing here, listening to the old white man leaning out the window. Because she didn’t have anywhere else to go. And this man, Thurston Redding, he knew that. She could see in his eyes that he knew that. He was still sitting there waiting for an answer. Patiently, even warmly, but she could feel the persistence behind it. Part of her knew to take that as a warning sign. But it wasn’t his kindness that got to her, it was her own desperation. It had been eating at her for some time in a way that she could not even understand or comprehend until this moment. Everything around her had been falling apart and Lysette had been doing whatever she could to avoid it. She didn’t want to think about it, the fact that she had no one to turn to, no support. Nothing. And she couldn’t even find a meal anymore.
This man was offering to take that all away from her. Whether she believed his intentions or not, she was in no position to decline the offer. Lysette had gotten by on survival instincts, but those only took her so far. They landed her in the street, alone and hungry. She couldn’t even afford a willing meal anymore. Guys would barely talk to her and most of them ran when she explained her condition. The only people that she was able to bring home with her were the ones that were really into it. The guys and girls that had always wondered what it would be like to be with a vampire. It wasn’t even a sexual thing, most of the time, at least not in a traditional sense. They wanted her to take their blood. With a knife, usually. That was the safest method of dining, the most surefire way to avoid infection.
This had always been the case, from the housewives down to the goth kids, the Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer readers alike, everyone wanted to be bitten by a vampire. They just didn’t want to be a vampire. People didn’t fantasize about that aspect anymore, not that she could see. They would lust after vampires from afar and they would observe them and ask them constant questions about their lifestyle. But it was nothing more than exoticism. There were no more role playing games or daytime soap operas about vampires conflicting with their conditions. While the fans remained, their interests had shifted. All the perks of vampirism were overshadowed by the fact that it was still a disease in the public consciousness. They saw the element of risk for the first time. When they looked at the vampires they lusted after so much and applied that to themselves, it was as if at that point it suddenly became too real for them.
That was what she had to do to feed in modern society, deal with people who—even after vampires were massacred in the streets—saw her as their great, gothic romance. She had to create an online dating profile, had to deal with fetishists on an almost nightly basis, just to keep herself fed. And she knew one or two of them must have turned by this point. It was never risk free. Eventually that got to them. The fact that even though they were living their lifelong fantasy of being bitten by a vampire, they could actually become one. There was the risk that at any second this would stop being glorified role play and would become something they would have to live with. Maybe forever.
It proved to be too much for people. Eventually they stopped messaging.
And taking blood by any other means was simply illegal. Which was a stretch in and of itself. How did the law take vampires into account? How do you punish someone who is legally dead? These answers were still being discussed, the rules were still being rewritten and in the process nothing was getting done. The world had finally admitted to the existence of vampires, but admittance was nothing akin to acceptance. That would never happen. Yet still she played the game, and all it had gotten her was here.
Lysette hadn’t eaten in two weeks.
She doubted very much that this man could offer her much in the way of food. He looked like the helping hand type, but not the blood fetishist. No, she suspected his tastes ran even weirder than that. But he would give her someplace warm to sleep that wasn’t an alley, a sewer or a crumbling mausoleum. She’d slept in all three recently, and she was done.
So she said yes.
And within a month, she was damning herself for her desperation, her hunger and, in that moment, her lack of strength. But more than anything, as she looked back on what had happened that night and everything that would happen afterwards, she cursed herself for simply getting in the car.