Free Vampire U by Hannah Crow Page A

she muttered, then turned and disappeared into the gloom, leaving the front door to swing on its hinges.  I opened the screen and followed.
    The smell was stronger here, the stench of a neglected home and a neglected soul.  I felt bile rising in my throat, but I forced it down, taking shallow, uneven breaths through my nostrils.  With the windows were covered, only dim light filtered in from beneath the curtains, barely revealing mounds of clothing, trash, and the debris of a human life scattered around a small living room.
    Kara Thompson plopped down on a sagging couch as though unaware and unashamed of her surroundings.  There wasn't another chair in the living room, but she invited me to sit on an overturned plastic bucket.  "What do you want to know?" she said.
    "You went to Romanus, right?"  I knew I had the right address, but this felt so wrong.  Kara Thompson looked far older than her twenty-six years.
    Kara lip peeled back to reveal a set of yellowing teeth set in inflamed gums.  "Best four years of my life," she said, her ragged voice dripping with sarcasm.  "You can see it's gone to shit since."  She waved around at her cramped, filthy home.
    "What happened?" I asked.
    Kara shrugged.  "Nothing happened.  I just didn't felt like doing much after school.  It's like waking up after a big party, you know?  You get one of those killer hangovers that ruins lunch.  Only this hangover never really went away."
    "You dated a boy in college from Beta House.  Can you tell me about him?"
    Kara flinched.  "Don't remember much," she said.  I waited for more, but her posture of exhausted apathy had faded into tight-lipped defensiveness.
    "It may be important," I said.  "What happened to you...  I think it's still happening to other girls."
    "You with them?" Kara hissed.  Her scrawny fingers clutched the couch cushions, and she dug her nails into the cushions as she leaned forward.
    "I'm not with anyone," I said.  "I just want to understand what's happening so I can..."
    "Get out," Kara snapped, her voice rising with a new strength.  "Get out of my house!"
    "Miss Thompson... Kara, please let me..."
    "Out!  Now!" she screamed, pushing her frail body up off the couch.  She shambled toward me, waving her sticklike arms in a flurry of skin and bones.  "Out!  Out!  Out!"
    I stumbled backward as I tried to rise and tripped over the bucket, which sent me sprawling into a pile of foul-smelling laundry.  Scrambling backward, I raised my hand as if to ward off a blow, but the madwoman only loomed over me, screaming, her yellow-rimmed eyes full of hate and fear.  "Get!  Out!  Of!  My! House!"
    I found my feet just as panic found me.  I threw the door open and ran out into the street.  On the curb, my hands shook so badly that I dropped my keys twice before I could get the door unlocked.  I glanced back and saw Kara Thompson standing in the shadowed doorway.  She had stopped screaming and stood like a statue, unwilling to step beyond the shade of the sagging porch.
    I wanted to get out of the car, to look her in the eye and tell her about Morgan, but I was afraid.  Afraid of what this crazy burned-out woman might do to me.  Face burning with shame, I jammed the car in gear and pushed the pedal to the floor, sending a spray of gravel up behind my car as I left the strange, sick woman in my rear view mirror.
     
    ***
     
    I'd promised Jacob fried chicken, but the thought of his persistent probing made me feel ill.  Instead of going back to the  Scryer,  I drove aimlessly, trying to make sense of what I'd just seen.  Kara Thompson's wasting pallor was a terrible harbinger of Morgan's fate - a stage-four chemo patient compared to someone who'd just found a spot of melanoma.
    My thoughts turned inward as I drove, mulling over everything I remembered from the night before.  So much seemed blurry, and some memories felt more like ghosts of something I'd seen on TV than actual experiences.  Deep in thought, I