Young Forever by Lola Pridemore Page B

get him out of the way so I could fight them off. But the details didn’t matter now because now he was really, really hurt. Like, physically hurt. Maybe his feeling were hurt too. But that didn’t matter, not now, not when his wounds were so deep, not now that he was about to die.
    I don’t know why it had to happen on this night but I guess that’s fate. Now it was time to tell him what I was and to let him in on what I was going to make him. I just wished it hadn’t turned out like this. We’d had such a good romance, such a whirlwind of events that all led up to this, to me and him staring at each other as we were now. Him, barely hanging onto life and me there, able to make him just like me—a blood-thirsty vampire. But, no, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted him to stay who he was. He was such a great guy. It was really unfair when you got right down to it.
    The way he was looking at me now made my heart break. He was moaning softly, in pain and in fear. He was cowering away from me. He was hurt, he was bleeding and he was this close to death. And that’s when the fangs had to come out. Now he saw me for what I truly was. He didn’t seem to like it very much and his face became animated, frightened.
    He managed to sputter, “ Wha …. What are you?”
    Was he serious? I was a vampire. I mean, hadn’t he ever heard of a vampire before? There were, like, many books and TV shows and movies about vampires. Wasn’t he required to read Dracula in school? Wasn’t that a classic? I’d read it and I’d never even been inside a school before. Hadn’t he connected the dots before now? I only “worked” nights at the hospital. I only met him for dates at night. I wore, mostly, black. Sometimes white, though. My skin was luminous. My straight blonde hair shimmering. My body was tall, thin and perfect. Humans just didn’t look like me. There was neither a wrinkle nor imperfection to be found on my face. And my skin was cold.
    But maybe the reason he didn’t connect the dots was because humans didn’t know of our existence. Yes, there was a lot of mythology about us vampires but no real proof. And we liked it that way, keeping ourselves separated, cut off from “normal” society. However, I think that if he’d looked just a little closer, he might have noticed that there was something amiss. I was too perfect. I looked preserved. But maybe he hadn’t looked because he liked what he saw. Maybe he was blinded by love. Yeah, that could have been it. They say that love is blind and now that I looked at him, I realized how true that is.
    “ Otta ?” he breathed.
    Isotta was my name. It’s an old name. He shorted it for me to Otta . I liked that. It was cool. It meant he liked me enough to give me a little nickname, to make me feel special, like I was special to him. It really appealed to the young woman inside of me.
    He coughed and all this blood came out of his mouth. I held his chin as he did so. He was terrified. He was about to die. I’d have to turn him soon. I felt bad about that, too. I wanted him to stay human but I had no choice.
    “I do not like him,” Gerta had said right after he left our house one night after I started dating him.
    “You don’t like anyone,” I replied because it was true.
    “No,” she said. “I just do not like humans.”
    I rolled my eyes in response but offered no words. She turned to me, trying to understand my fascination with this young man. I stared back at her, at her beautiful face and creamy yet icy ivory skin. Her blue eyes were enough to frighten anyone. They just pierced right through you. I’d seen humans run from her at a single glance but not knowing why they were afraid. It was funny when that happened.
    “Leave him,” she said. “He will be trouble.”
    She said that a lot. Maybe it was because he was the son of a wealthy, well-known doctor and that would bring us some unwanted attention. He was a prodigy, completing medical school in record time, as