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Chapter Six After almost a week of not dealing with any siren stuff, things had started to brighten up a little bit. My mother’s answers to my questions were vague, as is any message she passes on to me. She did warn me about one thing though, that I was in danger. Of what I was in danger of, I have no idea. There are tons of things to read about in the siren book and each of them sounds as dangerous and threatening as the last. It’s not until Thursday night when it really hits me that these things exist. Anna comes running into my room, pressing a cloth to her neck and tells me to ring Tina. I’m hesitant to ring until I see the blood stains on the cloth. I flick the kitchen light on and for the first time ever, I’m forced to deal with a vampire bite.

Shaking as I move around the kitchen, Tina relays carefully what I’m supposed to do and I fumble around, suddenly aware that Anna knew all about me, and Tina’s involvement in this. I light up the candles and I start repeating the words Tina is saying to me while choking back tears. Everyone is being level-headed about this, and I’m scared to death. “Finally,” Tina says, “you need to hunt down the vampire that did this, and you need to kill them.”

“What?” I yell back, a little louder than I should. I’ve never seen a real vampire before, let alone killed one. Anna looks up at me, a little terrified but I tell her to stay calm and she stays sitting in the circle of candles I’ve set up around her. I’m just glad she hasn’t lost too much blood. What do I know about vampires? I know about all the fictional vampires, like Dracula and the ones from Buffy, and I know what I’ve read in the book. They’re a pest, like a spider bite. I inhale a breath before asking Tina, calmer than I was before.

“How do I kill a vampire?”

Anna wants to help me, but she can’t leave that circle, so she tells me exactly where she keeps the weapons for this sort of an emergency. I’ll ask her later why she never told me she knew about this, but killing this vampire is my biggest priority right now. I pick up a wooden stake, a bottle of holy water and a crucifix like the ones I always saw on Buffy as a kid, and I walk out the front door, purposely making my footsteps as loud as I can. Anna was in the driveway when the vampire bit her so it wouldn’t be far now, wanting to finish the job. I hear a growling behind me and see the ugliest human being I have ever seen, its limbs famished, hair matted and its pallor looking like it had been decomposing for weeks. Its eyes are unfocused and hazy but its fangs and its growl scream that it is lustful for blood, my blood. I step back as I try to untwist the cap on the holy water bottle. I don’t want to get close enough for it to grab me, but as I’m untwisting and fumbling backwards I trip over a crack in the footpath and fall backwards, landing hard on my elbows. I’m careful not to make much noise because I don’t want people coming out here and seeing me. The thing stumbles towards me, struggling to keep its limbs moving. Its standing over me and I fumble around for my stake before realising that its rolled down onto the curb. I start panicking and I hold onto the crucifix in front of my chest for dear life, when this thing catches fire, burning up and screaming in agony as it goes.

Its traumatic for a minute as this thing burns up entirely and then settles as a pile of ash. As the ash disappears I notice someone standing behind it, with shoulder length blonde hair, a leather jacket on top of her midriff top and leather pants. I recognise her face as soon as I sit up a bit and it shows more in the light. “Claire,” I rasp out, my voice trembling with nerves.

“You shouldn’t be out here, Humphreys,” she asserts, “This isn’t playtime.”

As I sit down inside, all the candles around Anna have blown out and Anna is treating herself with the first aid kit. I sit down at the dining table with her and she smiles at me and says calmly “You were very brave, Lauren.” I look at her with disbelief and with the nerves raw in my voice I ask her,

“How long have you known about all of this?”

I’d like to know what Claire’s involvement in all of this because I hadn’t given her much second thought aside from being a whiny brat, but I’m also worried about Anna. She knew about the “curse” but I didn’t think she knew why it was there. She tells me everything she knew, everything Tina had told her and everything she knew from George’s sister. I don’t know what my Aunt Carol had to do with any of this, but apparently there’s way more complications than I already thought. It’s almost as though with one revelation comes the revelation that everybody else knew except you. I wonder if Hunter knows more than he’s letting on. Anna gets Friday, Saturday and Sunday off work after she tells them she was attacked by a man with a knife on Thursday night. She tells the same story to Byron and our nosy neighbours who ask when Anna goes to get the mail and notice the giant bandage on her neck. Byron suggests that we should get a guard dog for the place and Anna makes up another story about being terrified of dogs due to a traumatic childhood experience. I can see in her face that she hates lying to him, but she knows that the less people who know about this, the better it is for everyone. Hunter is more than willing to postpone our date on Friday night when I tell him about Anna. Rose says her mum told her all about it but I don’t know if Tina told her about it being a vampire or a knife man, so I don’t question it. The one person I do want to talk to though, Claire Dunmore, is nowhere to be seen. For the first time in seventeen months, we don’t go to the library on Saturday, the last time being when it was closed for Christmas Eve. Police come in to question Anna after our nosy neighbours called the cops. They walk in the house and stand in the lounge room, questioning Anna while she lays across the couch. They ask her all these questions but she just says that he came up behind her, asked for her wallet, which she wouldn’t have had on her anyway, and cut her across the neck when she said she didn’t have it. They ask to see the scars, but Anna says that she’d rather if she didn’t because she didn’t want to start the bleeding again. Translation: I don’t want to show you because it didn’t really happen like that. Once they leave, I sit down with Anna as she cries into my lap, still not feeling well enough to sit up properly. Byron comes over later and takes my spot, comforting her while I make her a cup of tea. The bite might be gone, but the trauma is still here and it’s shaken all of us. Around six, Tina, Rose and Toby all show up at the front doorstep, Tina carrying one of her homemade lasagnes. Toby is obviously feeling out of place here, so I go digging through my room and find one of my favourite books as a child –Welcome to Dreamland. When I was little I would get Anna to read it to me every night. It was our escape where we could imagine anything we wanted and each of us would look at each other and we’d agree that we were so much smarter than the night before. It never occurred to me how much Anna made sure that I read and kept reading. As I hand the book over to Toby, he again points to the Galloway sword on my bracelet and pulls out his necklace, as if he had to prove that they were the same. Sometimes I just wish that Toby could speak and tell me exactly what he wants, but he’s never really been confident with it. His eyes light up like he’s in a candy store when I give him the book. Rose, in a surprising turn of events, isn’t checking her phone and has a genuine empathy about her. Tina is in the kitchen heating up food she prepared and serving up dinner for the six of us. I don’t know where I fit in all of this. After dinner, Rose and I are left to help Tina clean up, but Byron comes in and tells us to go keep Anna occupied. Anna and I have never needed or wanted constant attention. The best thing for us is when we have quiet time alone, but Byron doesn’t know Anna that well yet, so I humour him, not wanting to disappoint him. On Sunday I check Facebook while Anna goes out to water her little herb garden. It’s hardly standing after all the neglect it’s received, but she pours the water over it anyway. It’s just good to see her walking around again. I know she doesn’t want to go to work tomorrow but there’s no talking her out of it. “Someone has to pay the bills, Lauren,” she tells me, and for the first time she sounds like a parent and not Anna. When I login there’s a stack of messages in my inbox of people I never talk to telling me that they’re sorry about my mum. Anna, I think, not mum. Then alongside everything is a friend request from Claire Dunmore, who I would’ve rejected any other time, but I know it’s the only way I’m going to talk to her. I just hope Hunter doesn’t think it’s so I can talk to her about him. Within minutes of accepting her friend request she sends me a message – “You need to tell me everything you know.” Funny, I was thinking of saying the exact same thing.