She knew. The hunger churned in her gut, gnawing at her, and she knew.

“Why did you tell me?”

Qendressa sobbed. “Because you are not my baby anymore, ’Nika. You’re sixteen. Sixteen years since that night. I know the stories. You are shtriga now.”

Donika felt something break inside her. She spun on one heel and ran. Low branches whipped at her face and she raised her arms to protect herself. She stumbled over roots and rocks that she’d always avoided before. The owls hooted above her, and now she could hear their wings flapping as they moved through the trees, keeping pace.

In her life, she had never felt so cold. No matter how fast she ran, no matter how her pulse quickened, she could not get warm. Her sobs were words, denials that felt as hollow as her own stomach. The hunger clutched at her belly and a yearning burned in her. Desire.

Josh. She summoned an image of him in her mind and focused on it. They could run together. He would hold her. He could touch her, and maybe, for a little while, the madness and hunger would fade.

A numbness came over her, but Donika began to get control of herself. She still wept, but silently now. Her feet were surer on the path. She saw the stone wall to one side and the fire pit ahead and the memory of last night gave her something to hold on to.

Soon, she found herself at the end of the path, stepping out into the backyard of the bitter old couple. An owl hooted, back in the woods, and she hurried away from the trees, wanting to leave the forest behind for the first time in her life.

She strode across the back lawn unnoticed. A dog barked nearby, the angry yip of a canine scenting the presence of an enemy. Donika made her way between houses, but as she came in sight of the corner where Josh would be waiting, she paused.

Hidden in the night-black shadows of those homes, she watched him. Josh sat on the curb, smoking a cigarette, content to be by himself. He waited for her and didn’t mind. In the golden glow of a nearby streetlamp, he was beautiful to her. They would run through the dark woods together once again, but this time she would give herself to him.

Desire clawed at her insides. She ran her tongue out to wet her lips. She could almost taste the salt of his skin, and the urge to do so, to taste him, tugged at her.

A smile touched her lips and she almost called out.

Donika’s smile faded.

No, she thought. It isn’t love. Desire isn’t love. Hunger isn’t.

She understood hunger now. Donika fled silently back into the woods, where she belonged. The owls cried and flew with her. Loneliness clutched at her until she realized that she wasn’t alone at all. She had never been alone.

The woods received her with love. She could never go back to her mother’s house. Not now.

She hurtled along the path and then left the trail, breaking off into rough terrain. She raced through the woods, leaped fallen branches, and exulted in the night wind whispering around her. Her tears continued to fall but they were no longer merely tears of sorrow. Her mind whirled in a storm of emotions, but beneath them all, the hunger remained.

Surrendering to the forest and the night, she stripped her clothes off as she ran, paying no attention to where she left them. The moonlight and the breeze caressed her naked flesh and now the warmth returned to her at last. She felt herself burning with want. With need. And then she could feel her skin hanging on her the same way that clothes did, and she reached up to the edges of her mouth and pulled it wide like a hood, slipping it back over her head.

Donika slid from her skin and, at last, took flight, returning to the night sky after sixteen very long years. Reborn.

She flew through the trees, thinking again of the boy she desired, thinking that maybe he would be inside her tonight after all, and they would both get what they wanted.

Her mouth opened in a low, mournful cry. It was a tune she’d always known, a night song that had been in her heart all along.

I Was a Teenage Vampire

Bill Crider

Bill Crider is the author of fifty published novels and numerous short stories. He won the Anthony Award for best first mystery novel in 1987 for Too Late to Die and was nominated for the Shamus Award for best first private-eye novel for Dead on the Island. He won the Golden Duck award for best juvenile science fiction novel for Mike Gonzo and the UFO Terror. He and his wife, Judy, won the best short story Anthony in 2002 for their story “Chocolate Moose.” His latest novel is Murder Among the OWLS. Check out his home page at www.billcrider.com.

If you really want to hear about it, which a lot of people do, being naturally curious, you probably want to know where I was born, and what I was like as a kid, and how I wound up living (in a manner of speaking) under a bridge, and all that Catcher in the Rye kind of crap, but I just don’t feel like talking about any of that right now, and anyway it’s not all that interesting, to tell you the truth.

I’ll tell you how I got to be a goddam vampire, though. That’s pretty interesting. It was all because of my sister, Kate, who you’d think would know better, for Crissake, because she was practically a high school graduate, but then there aren’t a lot of geniuses in my family, including me, although I did make a pretty good grade in a civics class one year.

Kate can’t take all the blame. If she’d never seen those movies, it might have been different. It wasn’t my fault, though. I was just an innocent bystander.

Anyway, being a vampire isn’t as much fun as you might think it is. I mean, you probably think it’s all about the cape and the gleaming white fangs and the ripping good times you could have after the goddam sun goes down. Or maybe you don’t think that, but that’s what I thought, which shows how much I knew because I was wrong. Dead wrong, just to throw in a little vampire humor there.

What happened is that my sister was planning this big party for her eighteenth birthday, which happened to be on Halloween, and she wanted it to be really special. My crummy parents said she could do whatever she pleased, which is what they always said when she asked for anything because they liked her best. You probably think that’s just sour grapes, but it’s not that. It’s just the way it was, and it never bothered me because I was used to it, after all.

What she wanted was a vampire.

“Like Christopher Lee,” Kate said. She has this way of brushing her hair back out of her eyes when she talks, which is frankly pretty irritating, but she thinks it’s cute and that the boys like it. I don’t know about other boys, but it just seems phony to me. “Like that movie we saw last year, Horror of Dracula.”

She went to a lot of movies like that. I Was a Teenage Werewolf. I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. But she liked stuff with vampires best. They’d never made one called I Was a Teenage Vampire or she would have been first in line.

“You know,” Kate said. “Remember what the ads said? ‘The chill of the tomb won’t leave your blood for hours.’”

She tried to say the last part in a deep, creepy voice but it wasn’t deep, and it wasn’t creepy. It was just phony.

“You don’t have to laugh,” she said, because I couldn’t help it. “It’s your stupid friend Binky who says he knows a real vampire.”

“Binky wouldn’t know a vampire if it bit him in the ass,” I said, which I knew was a pretty crude thing to say, even to my sister, but I was getting tired of the way she was brushing at her hair. Besides, I was wrong, as it turned out. “And he’s not my friend.”

“Well, he’s certainly not my friend,” she said. “And you don’t have to use that kind of language.”