Imagine! Me, Spinne the great sorceress, letting my big brother make me cry! It was positively ridiculous! Fortunately, I don’t believe he saw.

Ever since he had been bitten, Vladimir’s temper had become steadily shorter, but this was the first time he had actually broken something. It scared me, but I wouldn’t let him catch onto that. I’m supposed to be the strong, levelheaded, reliable one; I can’t be caught crying. In fact, I don’t think I’ve cried since that night…Oh, wonderful. Just what I need: a flashback. I suppose it had to happen sometime. Like Vladimir said, I can’t just keep on pretending that nothing happened.

---

“I’m going out,” Vladimir said, cramming a bagel in his mouth.

“What about Spincer, Vladdy?” our mother asked, muting the television, “I thought you were going to pick her up from school today.”

“She said she’d rather walk anyway. And, Mom, please don’t call me ‘Vladdy’.”

Mom just laughed and turned the T.V. back up.

Vladimir had been planning to go out with a few friends that weekend, and was really looking forward to it. I knew he was, and I didn’t want to ruin it for him, so I walked home.

The wind whipped my hair into my face and my teeth chattered like castanets. I wished to God that I had brought my other windbreaker, the warm one that wasn’t just meant to look pretty. But all I had was the new, useless designer jacket that Mom had bought me. I pulled my backpack and purse around me tighter, as if they could give me more warmth, and trudged onward. It was only a seven minute walk to home anyway, I could tough it out.

Spincer the princess can tough it out, I thought bitterly. I hardly had any friends at school because of my wealthy parents. I never had to do chores; we hired people for that. I always had new clothes, new purses, new jewelry…It bothered the kids at school, I guess, that I was better off than they were. And so it came about that I was Mommy and Daddy’s little princess.

“When’s your limo coming to get you, Your Highness?” they’d ask me after school. Just annoying stuff like that, but I took it to heart.

I walked in the front door and Emit, our butler, took my things.

“Has Vlad already left?” I asked my mother.

She sniffed and held up a finger to silence me. I looked at the television and rolled my eyes; the last four minutes of her soap opera, no wonder.

“Still here,” Vladimir called from the kitchen. I walked in and sat down at the counter. He was digging through a drawer, tossing aside pens and paper.

“Got a twenty?” he asked me.

“Only if you promise to pay me back.”

He made a sort of “yeah, yeah” face at me, and I handed him the money.

That was the last thing I said to him before he was turned; “Only if you promise to pay me back.” Had I known what was going to happen that night, I would have said something deeper than “pay me back.” ...No, if I had known what was going to happen, I wouldn’t have let him leave at all.

He stuffed the money in his pocket and went out the door. I’d like to say that I had an ominous feeling as he left, or that I was overcome with love for my brother, but all I thought about was that he needed to quit mooching off me.

I was going out with a few friends that night, too. They weren’t really friends, though. They just thought it was cool that I was rich. Anyway, we decided to go see the latest chick flick that had hit theaters, even though I honestly wasn’t into those sorts of things. But I had an act to keep up if I wanted to keep these “friends”. And with them, “designer labels” equals “likes chick flicks.”

I showered and changed clothes before calling Melissa, the one with the highschool boyfriend. We all thought he was really awesome, mainly because anyone who can drive is cool to a thirteen-year-old girl. Melissa told me they’d pick me up in a few minutes.

I don’t remember anything after that point until I heard about Vladimir. I couldn’t tell you the name of the movie we saw, if I had liked it or not, even what it was about. It’s like everything was erased in comparison to my brother’s accident. His “accident”. That’s what the doctors called it. But everyone knew it wasn’t an accident.

I got the news right after the movie. My friends were all laughing, and I was actually having a good time for once. Then my phone rang.

“Hello?” I said cheerily.

My mother answered. Her voice was flat and unnerving.

“Spincer, Vladimir’s in the hospital. They don’t if he’ll make it. Your dad’s picking you up.”

Everything stopped. I couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. My heart was beating so fast it was painful. I felt like every part of me was screaming, but I couldn’t make a sound. My friends asked what was wrong, but I just stood there…Just stood there until my father drove up and helped me into the car. I stayed like that the whole way to the hospital, and my father knew better than to say anything. He was just as terrified as I was.

When we got there, Vladimir was in surgery. They had to sew up his neck where the veins had been ripped open. The doctor said he had never seen anything so gruesome in his life; it was as though something had bitten a huge chunk out of his throat. We sat in the waiting room with two other families. All of them were crying, but we weren’t. Dad just paced back and forth. Mom filed her nails to keep herself distracted. A few hours later, a nurse called us over, and we managed to convince her to let us see Vladimir. She told us he wouldn’t be conscious yet, but we didn’t care.

I didn’t cry until I saw him lying in the hospital bed, beaten and sewn up like someone’s sick idea of a stuffed animal. Needles and wires stuck out of him at all angles. He was barely breathing. I couldn’t stand it. I ran out of the room sobbing, and no one could get me to come back. That broken body wasn’t my brother. I couldn’t even connect the two images as one person. The Vlad I knew was cool, athletic, and upbeat; the kind of person who wouldn’t let anything stop him. Eventually, I would discover that he was still the same person. Even after having his life ripped apart and destroyed, he was still persevering.

A few weeks later, he was home. Everybody at the hospital agreed that no one had ever recovered from such extensive injuries in such a short amount of time. Of course, they attributed it to an excellent immune system, not developing vampiric healing powers. Go figure. At the time, we didn’t care how it had happened, we were just glad to have him back. However, we soon realized that something was not quite right with him. He got severe sunburns after spending only a few minutes in direct sunlight, he had trouble sleeping at night, and he had no appetite for anything. Or so we thought.

We tried to ignore all of his strange symptoms; none of us wanted to admit that he was different now. But after an incident about a month after he came home, we realized that we couldn’t deny it anymore.

Mom had decided to cook for once. We were all a little wary of that idea, since we had only seen her cook a few times before and none of those experiments were successful. Nevertheless, she bought several steaks, insisting that she had been studying up on cooking with the Food Network. She put the steaks in the refrigerator that afternoon so that they would be thawed out for dinner the next day.

Later that night, Mom woke up and went downstairs to get a glass of water. When she walked into the kitchen, she discovered Vladimir, crouched on the floor and sucking a raw steak dry. Sucking it, like a juice box or something. Needless to say, Mom started screaming bloody murder. By the time Dad and I got in there, Vladimir had already fled the scene, so while Dad was comforting Mom, I snuck back upstairs to Vladimir’s room.

“Hey,” I said as I entered. I saw a shadow shift by the window. “If you were that hungry, I would’ve made you a sandwich or something.”

As the joke spilled out of my mouth, I knew it was the wrong thing to say. I sighed and sat down on the bed. “Sorry.”

“Spinne?” He was the only one who called me that. It was his special name for me.

“Yeah?” I answered softly.

There was a long silence before he continued.

“What’s happened to me?”

His voice was barely there and sounded as thin as he was. He was scared, and that scared me. He had always made sure that I felt safe and assured no matter what. I wasn’t used to seeing him so insecure.

“Come here,” he beckoned me over. “Look.”

As I sat down on the floor next to him he took my hand, opened his mouth, and ran my fingertips across his teeth. I drew back in shock.

“You’ve got-”

“-fangs,” he finished in a strangled whisper. “Spinne, something’s wrong with me.”