The Donor House: Alice: A Death at the Donor House (part 3)
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“You are right, Nick,” Alice said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Someone we did all know is now dead, but how many lives have we saved? Think, don’t just feel.”
Nick looked at her and understanding passed between them. No matter what had happened in the past, Alice was still the person who knew him better than anyone else and he was letting his feelings get in the way of his mind. It was something he’d always done. She was the one who thought and then felt.
“How do we know we have saved any lives?” Nick asked.
“Don’t ask stupid questions, Nick,” Lewis almost growled. “We haven’t just saved humans from vampires, but we’ve saved vampires from vampires. Everyone here knows how badly becoming a vampire can affect people and I’m certain that some of the vampires who now visit the house have only changed because it exists. I’m not going to let them close us down because one thing has gone wrong.”
Nick turned his attention to Lewis. They still didn’t get on, and Alice was almost certain it was jealousy on Nick’s part that was causing the problem, but there was nothing she could do to stop it. She wasn’t going to stop being friends with Lewis, or any other man, just because Nick was jealous.
“You don’t understand.”
“Maybe I don’t.” Lewis shrugged. “I’ve never said I did. I’m just stating my point of view. This place is too important to give up.”
Shaking his head, Nick sighed. “Fighting the auction vampires is going to be almost impossible. If you want to believe what they say then the auctions have been going for almost as long as there have been vampires. We’ve been open for what? Four years? It’s not enough.”
“Why does time matter, Nick?” John asked, and Alice knew, without any doubt, that he was beginning to understand why Nick was being pessimistic. John was the most empathetic of all the vampires in the house. “It seems to me that being young isn’t as big a problem as you think it is, because we know that we’re doing the right thing. We’re doing something that should have been done a very long time ago.”
“The auction vampires have been in control of our world for a long time,” Nick explained. “Each one can, apparently, trace their bloodline back to the first vampires. When the house first opened they would have been laughing at us. How could something like this, with humans and vampires mixing together, actually work? Now that we, thanks to Lewis, have almost total control of Bognor, we’re becoming dangerous. They want us gone and they will do anything to make sure that it happens. One death is nothing compared to what could happen.”
“We plan how we can stop those things from happening,” Lewis said, sounding a little less angry. “If we can work out what went wrong this time, how someone ended up here from the auctions, we can do something to stop it.”
From the corner Blake said, “We could be jumping to conclusions here.”
“What do you mean?” Issac asked, as they all turned to look at him.
“Ever since we stepped into this room we’ve been assuming that the vampire was from the auctions, but we all know what they’re like.” Blake smiled. “They’re sneaky. That’s why they left Qui wandering around. What if the vampire was new, rather than dangerous, sent here because they knew she wasn’t ready to be left alone with a donor?”
Alice glanced at Nick and then at Issac. “It’s possible,” she said. “Blake is right. They have done something like this before and if he’s right there’s a vampire out there who needs our help.”
“Why didn’t she say anything?” Issac asked, sadness filling his voice.
“Her creator probably brainwashed her before sending her to the house. We’re the only vampires she’s spent any time with, which is something we should probably change, so she would have been told that we were only pretending to be nice.” Alice shrugged. “It would explain why she made a run for it instead of talking to us. She didn’t understand that we would help her to control the blood lust.”
Nick ran a hand through his hair. “It still shows that the auctions think that we’re dangerous.”
Nodding, Alice smiled unwillingly. “How did we get to this point? When we first opened the doors none of us really thought anyone was going to turn up, unless they happened to know us personally, and now we’re actually scaring the auction vampires.”
“Pure luck,” Issac replied, “mixed with good planning and the fact that we do actually know a lot of vampires between us. Even if they didn’t come themselves, because they worked out their own way to cope with being a vampire, they would have told vampires who needed our help, and then the word would have spread.”
“How can we tell a young vampire from an old vampire?” Blake asked. “That’s what we need to know right now?”
“I don’t think there is a way,” John said slowly. “A young vampire looks exactly the same as an older vampire, unless you get to that point of no return, and sometimes it’s not even obvious that the vampire is at that point. It all depends on the vampire themselves, who they were as a person, and who they’ve become as a vampire.”
“We can ask for an age,” Issac said, scribbling down notes on a bit of paper.
“There’s no guarantee the vampire won’t lie and I don’t think it’s fair to chuck a vampire out simply because they don’t know their age,” Alice replied. “Older vampires sometimes forget how old they are, so there’s no guarantee that their not telling the truth just because of that.”
“Alice is right,” Lewis said. “I’ve worked with a lot of older vampires and they simply have no idea when they were changed. They might remember some points in history, but that could be because they were big things that happened.”
Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.