Creatures of the Night

Emelia’s visage was thinner and much more pale than John remembered. There was only the faintest trace of colour to her cheeks, and her breath came out in shallow puffs through her nostrils. She seemed a hair’s breadth away from ****, yet strangely, her lips were curled into a blissful smile, as if she were having a pleasant dream. But at the very least she was alive for now.

John gently shook her shoulder, her body cold to his touch, but got no more response than a slight catch in the rhythm of her breathing.

“She hasn’t responded to anything so far,” Sam sighed as she stepped forward. “Neither have the other three,” she gestured to the bedside where three other girls lay on the floor. Pillows had been placed under their heads and they likewise were covered in sheets.

“Good to know,” John muttered, before his attention drifted down Emelia’s slender arm.

The inside of her forearm was a hatchwork of tiny scars, by no means large enough to be caused by a knife… more like a dozen small pinpricks. “She used ****?” John squirmed uncomfortably as he took a closer look at the scars. John’s eyes flickered to her face, and then he recalled how flushed and shy she’d been talking to him at school. She really hadn’t seemed the type. ‘But then I suppose we all have our vices… and our secrets,’ he sighed, sure that a psychologist could write a whole thesis on him.

John’s eyes narrowed in on a twin pair of scars, larger than the rest, with the surrounding skin still bruised, suggesting it was only a few hours old. “Huh,” he hummed, taking a small peek at the other girls. They had matching scars on their arms. “It could be that whatever’s knocked them out was a ****,” John suggested as he stood up to take a look around the room. “There any used needles around the place?”

“Uhm… there was a bag of sunshine on the counter downstairs but nothing injectable from what I’ve seen,” Sam replied.

“What about in here?”

“I haven’t been snooping through her drawers, no,” Sam replied, eying him steadily.

“If we take a look around, we may learn something,” John reassured her. “Red, Moira, mind helping us look?”

“Sure,” Red shrugged in reply.

“Moira?” John turned to see the Warden uncomfortably fidgeting as she took in the splatters of spunk coating the sheets, walls and women, and the general stench of the room. Her face was as crimson as her hair. “W-what happened in here?!”

“Uhhh…”

“D-did you…?”

“Yeah…”

“B-by y-yourself?”

John nodded his head.

“By the Lady, you are possessed!” Moira breathed with a look of shock that was caught somewhere between lust and horror.

“Focus please!” Sam interjected as she snapped her fingers in front of Moira’s wide-eyed face.

“Uh… right,” Moira sighed before turning to help them look around.

There was nothing under the bed or tucked between the mattress and the sheets. Nor did they find anything in Emelia’s cupboards or drawers. Then, recalling the medicine cabinet behind the mirror, John decided to go and search in the bathroom.

“Multivitamins… pain relief… cold and flu…” John muttered under his breath as he scanned the two shelves. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nor was there anything of note under the sink or tucked behind the toilet. He let out a disgruntled huff before casting his eye towards a small metallic bin by the door. If anything was used last night, then perhaps it wound up in there?

John stepped forward and opened the lid and grimaced as he began to carefully rummage inside with the handle of a toilet plunger. He saw used tissues, brown-stained tampon, several q-tips, an empty multivitamin canister as well as something labelled rapture, a few crumpled packets of moisturising cream, but no sign of any needles or something that Emelia or the other girls might have injected themselves with.

Defeated, he rejoined his friends back in the bedroom. “Any luck?” he asked.

“Nope,” Sam replied with a downcast look. “But I was thinking… this can’t just be some normal OD. Four girls going comatose all in one night and nobody else can remember a damn thing is the opposite of normal.”

“You’re probably right,” John admitted. “But two of those scars are recent, last night recent, and I don’t know what would have caused them if not a needle.”

Red frowned and stepped closer to take a careful look at the arm. “Looks like a hickey to me,” she said after a short while.

“That’s a weird place for a l-love bite,” Moira stumbled over the word.

“Moira, dear,” Red chimed in. “I know you’re feeling out of place, but the time for embarrassment is later, for now we have work to do.”

The Warden looked at her friend and took a gulp of breath before her eyes narrowed. “Right.”

“Red, Sam, you girls bit anywhere?” John asked, knowing his own Gamer’s Body would have prevented any scars of that nature.

“No?” Sam replied with an ounce of confusion.

“That bite on Emelia’s arm definitely isn’t one of yours, darling,” Red replied with a small smile creeping onto her grim face. “I should know, you love to leave your mark on me. But jokes aside I don’t think it’s a human bite.”

“Anything you know of from the Abyss, then?” he asked his girlfriend.

“John!” Moira interjected with hushed hiss.

“What’s the Abyss?” Sam asked at the same time, her eyes practically sparking with interest.

“We’ll get to that soon,” John promised Sam before turning to his paladin friend. “We’re past the point of keeping secrets, Moira,” he argued, gesturing at Emelia’s anaemic body in emphasis. “And Sam’s already connected to the Abyss, she’s not...” John trailed off as he glanced between Sam and Emelia’s near-lifeless body. The raven-haired girl still wore remnants of her vampire costume from last night.

‘I-it can’t be… can it?’ John wondered, doing a double take on the girl. She was slightly pale, though not unnaturally so, and the twin marks on Emelia’s arm certainly fit with his image of a vampire bite. It had gone unnoticed to John before, but she stood on the far side of the room, away from the bedroom window. The curtains were drawn closed but a faint amount of light still filtered into the room.

“John?” Moira interrupted with a quizzical look. “What are you doing?”

“So, do the marks on Emelia’s arm look like anything you know? Red, Moira?” he voiced, ignoring the Warden’s question.

Moira huffed at his use of the ‘A’ word again before turning and crouching down beside the comatose girl. “Hmm… now that I take a closer look at them… they do look like some sort of blood sucker; a ghoul or vampire maybe, though I haven’t encountered either before so I’m not certain.”

“Hmm,” John hummed as his suspicions appeared to be confirmed. ‘But Sam couldn’t have done this deliberately, right?’ he thought. ‘I mean, if she did, why would she call for help?’ Sam might be a bit crazy (for fair reasons mind you) but she had never once struck John as a bad person. No, it seemed far more likely that, if she was responsible, it was purely by accident. ‘Maybe she’s a sort of late-bloomer like myself?’ he wondered.

“Alright… girls,” John searched for the right words to preface his theory. “Whatever happens next I want everyone to promise they’ll remain calm and keep any weapons stowed.”

Moira looked at him sourly and crossed her arms. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

“You’ve been having a good time so far?” John tried and failed to lift the mood of the room with something witty. “... Possibly not, no.”

“Weapons?” Sam cocked her head in confusion. “What do you mean? What’s going on?”

“Sam, Emelia may have been bit by a supernatural creature originating from the Abyss, which basically just describes a bunch of hidden dimensions littered all over the world.”

Another girl might have brushed John aside as a madman, but Sam eagerly nodded her head as he spoke as if it made perfect sense already.

“Appearances aside, Red here isn’t actually human, rather, a creature called a warg which can shapeshift into a large wolf, kind of like a werewolf but not quite. Moira on the other hand is a Paladin of God.”

“So God is real too?” Sam’s eyebrows arched.

“You believed in aliens but doubted God’s existence?” John gave the raven-haired, possibly vampiric girl a bemused smile.

“I mean, yeah?” she replied as if it was obvious. “There’s proof aliens exist but I’m supposed to just believe some dusty old book written thousands of years ago that some omnipotent being is keeping track of every time I touch myself over other chicks or don’t attend Sunday mass?”

“Wait, you’re a lesbian?” John’s mouth fell open.

“Uh… which team I shoot for isn’t exactly important right now; you were saying God exists?”

“But we-”

“Yeah, we did…” Sam replied in a way that suggested there was more to talk about. “But table that for now. God exists?”

“Uhm, right,” John mumbled as he composed himself. “Kinda… though she’s not known as ‘God’ in the Abyss; people either call her Gaia or the Lady. And she’s not the only god either, though she’s the most powerful. Pretty much every deity from every religion is around in one form or another.”

“Huh,” Sam hummed. “And what about you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, your girlfriend’s a werewolf, Brighton’s a holy warrior of… Gaia, but what are you?”

“A nerd,” John replied. “But anyway, we’ve gotten sidetracked. I can’t emphasise enough how dangerous the Abyss is, and once you’re in there’s really no way to get out. That’s why I didn’t want to tell you about it, I wanted to protect you.”

Sam’s expression darkened somewhat. “Well, thank you very much but I never asked for your protection, I asked for answers. So… what’s going on with Em?”

“I was getting to that,” John cleared his throat. “These bite marks are the only things common between all of the comatose girls, so I suspect that whatever bit them somehow drained their life ****.”

“Like a vampire, gotcha,” Sam nodded before her expression shifted into that of confusion. “Wait, so that means somebody we slept with last night was a vampire? Who?”

“Yeah…” John hummed as he opened an Observe window on Sam as a final test for his suspicions.