The last thing Natalia remembered was being rushed to the hospital in labor. The twins were early and the unforgiving contractions had caught up with her almost five months into the pregnancy. And although she was in the second trimester, her bulging womb would have told one she was long overdue. She does not remember when or how she got to the hospital, or who had taken her there, and she did not remember what happened at the time but she woke up a few days later in an apartment in the city she did not recognize. She was no longer dressed in her free long maternity dress but in an oversize light grey t-shirt and an even more oversize pair of black jeans. She could tell they were not hers and neither did they belong to a female. Everything seemed so loud and bright. She could hear the termites working their way through the neighbor's wall, a water pipe leaking in the drainage pipe seven floors down, the telephone conversation of one of the neighbors in the neighboring apartment and all the heartbeats close to her. The busy road passing near the apartment made it worse. She stood up carefully and walked to the closest window, which was almost ten meters away from her but she was there in a flash. She looked through the window and her eyes could see the couple making out under a tree a few kilometers from the building. It was impossible. Then she heard some footsteps getting closer and closer to the apartment. She did not know how, but she did. Then she heard the keys rattle and the door let open. She tried to ran to the door but even before her right foot took off, she was already there. The door opened and a man came in. A young man-in his mid-twenties. Too handsome to look at and she stood frozen, speechless, behind the large wooden door as it let way inwards. The man took off his leather coat and chuckled.
"I see you are awake." He said in his deep voice and shut the door behind him. Completely ignoring the startled woman trying to hide behind it. The man went on to the kitchen and came back with a glass of juice and another empty glass. He saw the woman was still behind the door. He smiled at her, sweetly. "Come on. I don't bite. You must be hungry." He stretched out his hand to her and patiently waited for her. She looked at it suspiciously.
"Where am I?" She asked after a while, still looking at his hand. She wondered if he did not tire.
"In my apartment." He answered.
"Why am I here?"
"Because I wanted you here." He answered briefly and pointed to his hand with his eyes then looked at the woman. He raised his eyebrows and the expectation in his face was too much for her to let down. She carefully stretched out her hand and slid it into his. His hand was warm, very different to how hers was. He pulled her to the seat opposite were he planned to seat and looked at her confused face. She looked at the glass with juice and immediately reached out for it and took a large sip. She then paused and looked at him. He was leaned in comfortably on the couch, smiling at her. He watched her hold the sip in her mouth. "What is it? Do you not like it?" She forced it down. After a while, it came back up and she rushed to the living room sink to let it out.
"Yuk! I think your juice is expired!" She snapped as she rinsed her mouth. After a while, she turned back and watched him take several sips of it.
"Tastes fine to me." He said after he was halfway through. She shook her head in disappointment. "Do you know or remember what happened to you?" The question made Natalie freeze in her step for a bit then she sat down. She shook her head. The man did not say anything but continued to enjoy his juice. Natalie could still taste its terrible aftertaste in her mouth. She wondered how he could not taste it. Then she suddenly remembered.
"I was pregnant!" She shot up and walked round the room. "I was rushed to the hospital five months early that my pregnancy was due?" She added. The man did not show any hint of emotion and continued sipping his juice. "And the contractions were going on terribly and there was a lot of screaming and blood…" She paused. She suddenly felt thirsty. Very thirsty. She could hear his heartbeat beating strong inside his chest. The thirst was increasing at an increasing rate. The man just looked at her calmly.
"You need to seat down." He said and pointed to the seat opposite him.
"Why am I so thirsty?" She asked. The man smiled at her and reached for the bag he had come with. He took out an opaque bottle.
"Who was the father of the baby? Do you know him?" He asked. She looked at him confused.
"What does that have to do with my thirst?" She snapped and she stood up again.
"This." He said briefly and opened the bottle and immediately the smell of blood filled the apartment. Natalie felt her urge rise even more and she reached for the bottle and drank it all in a flash that in the end only the crumpled bottle or its shell could be seen. It hit her when she threw the bottle on the table. "At least I did not use my glass." The man said sarcastically looking at the empty glass. He let the woman load what had just happened.
"What am I? Why did I just drink a whole bottle of blood as if I am a…" Natalie hesitated and slowly sat down opposite the man. She was feeling better but not fully satisfied. The man raised his brow, waiting for her to finish her sentence. "Am I a bat?" She suddenly asked. The man looked at her surprised then laughed his heart out. He laughed for a while. "I am glad to see my confusion amuses you." She said angrily. The man did not stop laughing. "Great. No help here. I shall go find it elsewhere." She said and she stood up and walked out. As soon as she shut the door behind her, she could hear everything going on in the apartment, but mostly, heartbeats and pulses.
"You won't last ten minutes before you kill someone." She heard underneath the many sounds in her head. She knew it was him. She opened the door and got back in the apartment. She stood before him and looked dead cold into his eyes. "Speak."
"Okay. I am Dylan. I am a doctor. That is where I got you from. You gave birth to twins- a boy and a girl but their father immediately took them away after you delivered them and I took you under my wing after he left you for dead. You actually died. But here you are. You have been unconscious for about two days- dead actually. But here you are. It seems the man you got entangled with was a monster- both literally and metaphorically. To summarize it all, you are a vampire now. Yei!" Dylan said and finished his last sip of juice. He stood up to go refill it and left the shocked woman trying to sink what he had just said and when he came back, she was still there.
"That is not possible." She whispered.
"No?" Dylan asked.
"No. Such things don't…" Dylan broke the empty glass next to him and cut his palm. The smell of blood ignited Natalie's senses and before she could do anything, she rushed over to him and began sucking his blood. She stopped a few seconds in. "Urgh! That burns!" She said and pulled away from his hand. Then she looked at him even more surprised. It was true! Dylan reached for the glass with juice and took a sip from it. Comfortably, as if nothing happened. "How…can this be?" She half-asked herself.
"It is very possible. Otherwise, how can you explain your undeniable thirst for blood, your quick speed, you strong hearing and visual senses. Your strength. You coming back to life. Your lack of taste for normal human food." Dylan said as he raised his glass to her and took it back to his mouth for another sip.
"But, how?" Natalie repeated the question as though she had not heard him explain. Dylan understood what she meant.
"It seemed the man you were with…how much did you know about him?" Dylan asked.
"Not much. I met him one time as I was going home from work around four-five months ago and we actually hit it off- or so I thought. It had been long since I…and he made me feel, you know, good. And he went missing and I was pregnant after a week. And I did not see him since."
"How was the pregnancy?"
"Fast and rapidly growing. It is as if I was having inside me…" Natalie paused to look for the best word to describe her children.
"Supernatural beings?" Dylan helped her complete her statement.
"Is that even possible? Vampires reproducing? I thought they could not, if they existed." Natalie questioned. From the myths she had heard, she knew that vampires never reproduced and they only multiplied by someone dying with their blood in their system.
"This is the first I have heard of this. I never knew it was possible. I never even knew a human could survive such rapidly growing beings in her belly. Especially twins. They could have killed you!"
"Why would I not survive?"
"Because they take off more that they allow you to have for yourself. And one reaches its full gestation period at two months. It seemed as if your children gave you enough time to have them at four months. Otherwise, you would not have made it."
"I thought you did not know much about the supernatural babies since they are not common."
"We react according to the myths fed to us and the assumptions." Dylan said and took another sip of juice. Natalie look at him and closer at his hand. It was not bleeding and neither was there a wound on it.
"So, you are one of us?" She asked.
"No. I am not."
"Are you sure? Because I am sure you have no wound at the place I dug into with my teeth a few minutes ago." She asked.
"I am one of you- a supernatural. But not one of you- a vampire."
"So you are what, a werewolf?" Natalie mocked and was surprised when Dylan nodded in agreement. "What?"
"I am a werewolf. Vampires and us don't- never- get along but we need to live in harmony so our ancestors got someone to make a pact between us to live in harmony. We share our lands and vampires never kill any of us. Thus our blood was made undesirable to you since you were the ones most likely to break the pact. And we have lived in harmony ever since. The pact would last if the vampires kept their hands off ninety-nine percent of the human population thus only allowed to focus on animal blood." Dylan said with a hint of victory in his voice.
"But that favors the werewolves more."
"As I said, you were the ones most likely to break the pact. So your measures had to be stringent. And besides, you still have the one percent. But you got the benefit of walking freely in the sunlight. The one thing you could never do before but thanks to us, you can."
"Never?" Natalie asked and Dylan shook his head. "But you gave me blood earlier! You broke it!"
"Did I really?" Dylan asked and put his feet on the table. His answer was more than enough for Natalie to understand what he had done. The room went silent for a while.
"I need to find my twins. No way I would let them be raised by such a horrible man!" Natalie said and put her face in her hands. She was frustrated.
"Okay. Then we find them, together." Dylan comforted her.
"Why would you want to help? I thought your kind and my kind never got along. And my children, their father and I are vampires. We are natural enemies."
"I know. But I brought them into this world and I do not believe a mother should be separated from her young ones." It was a shitty response and excuse. They both knew it but Natalie really needed the help to find her children and she needed to learn how to be more normal and only Dylan could help her. She agreed.