Page 59 of Those That Don't Exist
I’m flicking through images as a flash of red hair jumps across the screen. I click back and my blood freezes over. Staring back at me is a female. She looks to be late twenties, with soft eyes and porcelain skin. She’s not the spitting image of the female sitting across from me but there’s enough similarity that for a second I thought I was looking at a picture of Red. She looks scared, and tired. Her skin is drawn and the area under her eyes a deep purple - like Red’s were when I saw her for the first time without her glamour.
I read the case file quickly. Cecily Smythe. Twenty-seven years of age. Detained at a hospital after being admitted for migraines. She was held at the prison camp for twenty days before being executed by lethal injection and cremated - the standard for so many of these poor souls. I scan the interview notes expecting the usual but one thing quickly jumps out at me. No fangs.
Thedoctorstrying to prove her vampiric nature couldn't get her to produce her fangs. They firmly believed she had them because she devoured the blood left in her cell, but doctors never saw them. The blood drinking was enough to cause her damnation. I scan back up to her picture. It's too much of a coincidence.
“Red,” I stammer, a pit growing in my stomach.
“Yeah?” She looks up at me quizzically.
“What was your mother’s name?” Through everything we’d talked about over the last few weeks I don’t know this particular detail.
“Cecily, why?”
Fuck. My body goes cold. At the same time my brain starts spinning in freefall, pieces of a puzzle I’ve not been able to solve are falling into place.
“Cecily Smythe?” I force out the words.
“That was her maiden name, how did you know?”
“Come look at this.” I roll back from my laptop a little as she stands, moving round the wooden desk. I place her in my lap, wanting to hold her for what she’s about to read.
She stares at my computer screen, scanning the information displayed. I feel the moment she comprehends what she’s reading as she tenses against me.
“I’m sorry, I think this is your mother.”
“What is it?” she asks, starting to shake in my hold.
“Records from the extermination prison here in Froan.”
She reads for a few seconds more and I gently wrap an arm around her waist.
“No.” She shakes her head and I can see her hand on the trackpad shaking as she scrolls down. “This can’t be right. She died in a hospital of an aneurysm. She was also married to my dad, she was Cecily Capenor by this date.”
“I think…” I gently stroke her thigh with my other hand. “I think your mum may have been a vampire.”
“No,” she denies. “Dad would’ve said. He wouldn’t keep this from me.” She turns from the computer to look down at me, her face above mine as she’s perched between my legs on my right thigh.
“Maybe she didn’t know.” I try to keep my brain focused, trying to connect the dots and see the full picture. “That’s definitely her?” I ask to give myself a moment to think.
“Yes, I have photos of her from Dad, he always made sure she was part of my life growing up. And these details are all correct.”
“And they met at the orphanage where they grew up?”
“Yes, they were orphaned kids of the war. They grew up here in a kids home but moved to the countryside when they turned the legal age to leave. They’d always been together. Dad told me so many stories, how he was a couple years older, of how he protected Mum. How they were best friends their entire lives.”
My mind races for the answer. So many children were left parentless in the war, humans and Fae alike fought on both sides, there were civilian casualties. I remember seeing it in the cities, orphanages on the continent full to capacity. What if…
“And she kept getting headaches? Before she died?”
“Yes, she went through some complications in her pregnancy with me. After I was born she was alright for a while but then they got worse. Doctors were stumped for months. They sent her to the specialist hospital here in the city. The aneurysm burst whilst she was receiving tests.”
“Neither of your parents knew their parents?” I keep jumping back and forth.
“No. We have no idea who they were.”
“What if your grandparents were vampires?” As soon as I say it my brain clears. The pieces all fall together. It makes sense although I have no proof.
Red is the daughter of two vampires who had been left unturned, because they never knew who their parents were.
