Wishing Upon A Star

Wishing upon a star, my mother once told me, was the way to make your dreams come true.1

“Gods,” she had said, “are in the skies. Their will shines down in fires for all to see Their might.” Her voice had been dreamy, slow and slurred.2

“They won’t know what you want, unless you touch Their will.”3

Ever since then, I stared up at those stars every night and clutched Teddy to my chest. The alcove window was wiped clean with splotches of oil from my forehead when I was trying too hard to reach the stars.4

“I wish,” I breathed, my breath foggy on the window, “that she was alive.”5

Would the God’s be mad if I begged?6

“Please,” I added, though I was currently the embodiment of pleading. It was in everything I’ve done since she had died.7

And then the tears came, fell, as they have for the past month. Through the haze of liquid I saw a bird flitter across the sky, the feathers black as onyx. Its form covered the moon and I faded into tearful sleep.8

I dreamed of stars bursting, letting go of the force that held them together. Fires burned up the skies, and all our dreams went with them. They skipped blue phase and turned into black, dark holes, sucking in our hopes.9

There were no more dreams. People wandered the world in despair, restless in the dark void of faith or any warmth of emotion.10

No warmth except for the blood spilled on their hands. Thick as ink in the darkness, the same color as the crow perching over the world with a gleam in its eye, the same empty hue as the black hole pulling and destroying everything it could reach…11

I woke with a start. The sky outside my window was turning navy pitch, through I had passed out near dawn. Grief had strongly affected my sleeping pattern.12

My eyes were crusty and I felt, absurdly, violated.13

Not as if my body had been raped and my trust destroyed. Like I wasn’t alone.14

Chills crept down my spine and the cloudy sleep haze was slapped away.15

I was not alone.16

There was a shadow next to the wall. As I watched, the shadow drifted toward where I had been sleeping on the alcove cushions.17

And as I saw her, I felt happier than I had been when she had given me a rose quartz embedded pentacle for my twelfth birthday.18

Her hair was healthier than before in body and bounce, peachy blonde that was beautiful against her aristocratic, porcelain face.19

“Mom,” the whispered came from my mouth without a thought.20

But her eyes were wide and lit rubies21

Not blue anymore, like dark sapphires. But like fire and blood… 22

“My daughter,” her hoarse voice breathed, scratched and unused. There was a strange lilt that set off alarms in my brain.23

Then she smiled, and I saw the twin fangs protrude from her mouth, and I knew something terrible had happened.24

Please be a dream.25

A long talon of a nail brushed my cheek, gentle, but as the nail slid down, the edge bit into my cheek. I could feel the blood seep from the wound.26

She smiled.27

“What are you doing?” I gasped, jerking back.28

“Nothing, my daughter.” The voice was almost a purr, a cat enjoying the taunting of its prey.29

Her face leaned forward and I felt her tongue slide along my cheek.30

“Mom!”31

As I tried to turn from her, her hand clamped around my neck with surprising force. Enough power was in that grip that I knew, if she didn’t stop, she might crush my larynx.32

This time I sobbed her name. The pain in my neck clogged my eyes with tears, and she began lifting until my feet were off of the floor.33

I couldn’t breathe anymore.34

“Jenna,” a sharp, masculine voice barked in the haze of pain. “Is that anyway for us to kill?”35

Instantly the grip let go and I collapsed to the floor in a heap. My mother had turned her mane of glorious hair, confronting a man at the entrance of my room.36

He was darkness. His skin was black, not brown like African’s, but black like crows, black holes, and kohl. But against the color on his head was fuzz of white. Not silver or grey, but actually white, the type that would blind in the light of the sun.37

With a leather trench coat, black jeans and a cotton shirt, he was cloaked in the shadows of my room.38

“Don’t kill your daughter, Jenna,” the stranger ordered, and I saw that as his eyes narrowed, that nothing really changed about them. They were still all black. I couldn’t even see white around the iris.39

“But I’m hungry,” my mother pouted, and I could picture her lower lip trembling like a child.40

This could not be my mother. My mother had been strong, loving, and unselfish. From the past seconds that I had seen and heard this stranger, I knew this women before me was acting like a spoiled, greedy, inhumane brat.41

Not until I saw the blood on my hand did I realize I had touched my cheek.42

“Just a scratch,” the stranger informed me, arms covering his chest. On anyone else, the position would have looked insecure and comforting, but instead it shouted authority and menace. It was amplified by the gleam of danger in his dark eyes. I caught the look in them before they moved away from me and towards my mother’s body.43

From what I could tell, Jenna was staring—glaring, probably—at the obsidian man. Seconds ticked by where the only sound I could hear was my heart beating in my chest. Then, with slow reluctance, my mother turned and sat in the chair in the corner of my room. She didn’t even flick a glance at me.44

I sat back on my bed and watched my mother’s body animate movements, and all doubt that my mother’s souls still existed, dissipated. My mother would have held me and soothed my sobs, as she had done while dying from cancer. But this woman…the body of Jenna, but the walk of a slinking, prowling cat with patience to strike later. She wouldn’t even look at me.45

My shaking hands clutched at the blanket draped on the alcove cushions and I turned my eyes from Jenna to the stranger. He slowly walked into the room, his eyes intently watching my face.46

“So,” he said finally, “you’re the daughter.”47

He could have been saying, “You’re under arrest,” or, “Don’t move or I’ll shoot,” and I would have felt the same.48

Somehow, the words just invoked anger, and before I could stop myself, my elation escaped my mouth. “She,” I said indignantly, “is not my mother. She is an imposter, a poser, a wolf in sheep’s skin.”49

“Perceptive,” he said, and oddly I was flattered by his tone and voice, rather than the words. My hands stopped shaking. “Like Jenna was when I happened to walk into that hospital. She knew she would die, but you needed her. You have a great deal more spirit than your aunt can handle.”50

Strangely, I was flattered again. Was that heat creeping across my cheeks? I wished he wasn’t speaking so personal, so intimately.51

“So I granted her the wish within the recesses of her soul, to be there when you needed her,” he finished. “I gave her life.”52

“She isn’t alive,” I knew. “You turned her into a…into a…..what is she?”53

There was a soft chuckle, tinged with disappointment. “The undead, the damned, a lost soul. Or, simply, what you might call a vampire.”54

That made sense. A glance at my—Jenna, I mean—showed that she was watching me with wide, hungry eyes and parted lips now. I had to look away and stared at the dotted scars along the man’s forehead that I hadn’t noticed earlier. They almost shaped a crown, with the V of a diadem.55

“You made her like you?” Well, duh! my mind seemed to shout at me.56

“Like me?” He sounded stupefied. “I am no vampire, little girl.” I was glad to hear the seduction missing from his voice.57

“Then what are you?”58

He smiled, the edges of his thick lips wickedly tilted. “I’ve been called thousands of names: Loki, Hermes, A-Chey, Queen Mab—” He looked down jokingly at his body and grinned at me. His teeth were snowflakes against his skin.59

“Loki is a god,” I said with a bite of hysteria. I knew I was on the verge of it. My mom is a vampire and the guy who did it is a god? Right.60

But then I remembered how my mother had told me before she had died, about the Gods with their wills as stars and how she always said there were so many of them.61

Obnoxiously, the dark man bowed at the waist in flourish grace. “The Trickster. But you may call me—” he paused, then finally said, “—John.”62

“John,” I repeated, dumbfounded. “The Trickster God, John.”63

He gave me an odd look. “I happen to like that name. It is a saint, after all, and a king—” he came up short, as he tended to do. The playfulness in his voice vanished and he told Jenna, “Your daughter needs you now.”64

When I looked towards Jenna’s walled face, there was a snap of fingers. John had disappeared, I realized.65

Jenna stayed perfectly still, her eyes never twitching but definitely not empty. They had a gleam of treachery and excitement.66

That was her only sign of life.67

John and Jenna hadn’t closed the door to my bedroom. I saw a shadow drift towards my door and John’s voice whisper in my ear:68

Sleep.69

To the suggestion, drowsiness swamped through me even though I had slept the day away. I lied down against the cushions. They were still warm from over twelve hours of sleep.70

Then someone else was in the room. I was distantly aware of that, and that I didn’t know if it was John. Jenna’s body was still immobile on the chair.71

Someone’s going to die, I knew.72

And I would need my mother.73

Oh Gods, I thought, and I wondered if John could hear me. Let it only be a burglar.74

The impulsion towards the sleep was too strong for my consciousness. I drifted, unaware of the aunt stalking into my room with a knife in her hand. And I drifted, falling into the abyss of sleep. Drifted…75

I was jerked back with the pain in my chest and the damp cloth of my shirt and the cushions of the alcove. There was copper in my mouth and a scream let out in the room that made me realize the intruder was female and familiar.76

My eyes snapped open, lacking the crusty feeling of good sleep and I saw my aunt, a pointed butcher knife gripped in pale knuckles, and a pair of hands wrapped around her neck. The bone was jutting against her throat.77

And above my aunt was Jenna—my mother’s—smiling face.78

It wasn’t the same smile that used to make me fall asleep peacefully or made me beam with pride. This one would be in my nightmares until I died.79

Which wasn’t true, since then I realized my aunt had stabbed me. And that was when I died.80

“Jezabelle, wake up,” I faintly heard my mother’s voice. I attempted to roll over in my thin blanket, feeling sleep tugging across my mind so strong, I thought I would die without another minute of sleep. Flakes crunched under my body when I moved, so I stopped.81

“Jezabelle,” the voice repeated. It was intimate and motherly, achingly familiar. I hadn’t really known how much I missed that voice until now…82

“Just a few more minutes,” I mumbled, but the movement to breathe expanded the pain in my chest. It was sharp enough, the hurt so heady, that my eyes refused to open.83

Oh, I was so dizzy.84

“John, wake her up,” the same voice pleaded. Was that tears I heard in my mother’s voice?85

That note jerked my eyes open. What was wrong? 86

My mother was sitting on my bed, eyes touched with dread. John was leaning carelessly against a wall, dark arms crossed over his chest. There was a serious look to the set of his face, but his eyes twinkled.87

I looked back at my mother. “What’s going on?”88

But John answered instead—although ambiguously. “Drink.”89

And that was when my mother dragged her extended canines through the tender skin at her wrist. She brought the crimson stained arm to my mouth, reminding me of the blood in my dream, and with utmost uneasiness, I began to drink of a lifetime of thirst. Decades, centuries, millennia. As if I was time itself that had never had a touch of liquid, ever….90

It was so natural, the instinct to survive.91

The blood roaring in my ears was a vast ocean of senses. I could feel the dried blood on the cushions and blanket, the tick of the clock on my nightstand. It was 10 pm. I had been asleep for an hour, but it had passed by in a blink, not like the haze of sleep. I didn’t even feel rested.92

Except now I was active with more energy than I had ever felt.93

A spider was spinning a web in a corner, and the only heart beating I could hear was the recluses. John’s and my mother’s—if they had one—was inaudible.94

I couldn’t even hear mine.95

And then the ocean drifted, leaving me gasping as the pain went with it. The wrist moved away and fire wrapped around my body. Every nerve and cell was thrumming, living. I couldn’t see my mother’s drifting face.96

The fire ceased and I was in a euphoric state of being that was slowly drifting. But I felt wonderful, alive, potent, thriving, and powerful.97

In awe, I opened my eyes and met Jenna’s. Or at least, I tried to. She was fading, becoming transparent, ghost-like.98

“Mom—”99

She cut me off with a soft smile. “Jezabelle.” She faded more in just a word. “Be proud of what you’ve become.” And she kept fading, fading with each word, syllable, letter, until she was gone.100

Just gone.101

Terrified, I looked towards John. Somehow, I knew it would be futile to wave my hands where my mother had been moments before. I just knew he had the answer, and I wanted it.102

What happened to denial?103

John, the Trickster, discord extraordinaire, knew the question in my eyes. Or perhaps he could read it in my mind.104

“She saved you when you needed it,” he said unemotionally. He was void as everything, the black hole, empty and sucking in the world and my hopes with him.105

“So I’m a vampire now.” Whatever I was now, I knew I would embrace. I would adapt.106

“More or less.”107

He was being evasive. “And she’s gone again.” It wasn’t even a question.108

“She did her job.” He stood up, a move of muscle beneath cotton and leather that looked as smooth as shadow. The movement, anyway.109

“And you wanted me alive…why?”110

“You’ll see, sometime.” John the God grinned at me and winked. I was, for a moment, unnerved by the ebony orbs for eyes. More so than I had been as a human. Because now there was a cheery mirth and disposition instead of cold, calculative knowledge. Then he snapped his fingers and was gone.111

I was left alone on the blood soaked cushions in a room strewn with my aunt’s lifeless corpse. But this didn’t tip my balance. I didn’t even stare at the scene in disbelief.112

Instead, I accepted this change with my eyes on the stars.113

I had received my wish to have my mother back. She had made me this way, even if I don’t know why.114

Maybe I shouldn’t wish anymore on those stars. Who knew what else could happen?115

But…116

“I wish,” I breathed, “I knew why the Trickster God saved my life.”117

A crow flew against the sky. Beneath the bird’s wings, the star I stared at blinked.118

When the crow was gone, so was the star.119