Petra woke up, feeling refreshed. It was the first time she had felt this way all week. She doesn’t recall much from the previous night, but a biting, nagging sensation at the back of her mind tells her she’s better off. Strange.

  From what Petra can recall she left Agatha’s te st night and returned feeling… different. Agatha had hugged her, or she had hugged Agatha. Regardless her emotions had been a mess, yet she feels fine now— normal perhaps? Was this what normal felt like?

  She turns to look at Agatha, who is draped across the other side of the bed. She looks beautiful while she sleeps.

  Petra pulls the bnket off of her and presses her feet into the wooden boards. A cold sting greets her toes, and for a moment Petra is tempted to peel them from the floor and to return them back to the warm cavernous bnkets.

  Instead Petra carries on with her mission— she needs blood. Luckily her and Agatha, well mostly Agatha had just purchased a hefty supply of blood to feast on. Petra shuddered at the thought of having to feed on a living person. She’s not sure she could handle it.

  Thankfully it was a problem she would never have to face. Petra opened up her cooler and scanned through the bags. What was she feeling this morning; A-? No. Oh, perhaps AB-, that could be fun. Petra ruminated on her options for an eternity. Eventually she settled on the bag of one, Gary Saunders, B+.

  Petra didn’t bother with a gss, at checkout the cashier had thrown in a tube that could be inserted into the bag directly. Petra figured it would be much less of a fuss that way— plus it would be fun to drink it through what was essentially, a comically long twisty straw.

  Petra plopped herself down, onto the couch she has found herself rapidly familiarizing with over the past week. There is a brief struggle before Petra successfully manages to slide the tube into the blood bag. She leans back into the cousins and sucks the thick liquid up the spindly tube.

  The blood is refreshing. A sharp kick of fvor followed by a mellow fruitiness. Of the blood she’s had in her short vampire life this was probably her favorite. This Gary Saunders guy sure does now how to produce a good bag of blood. Petra makes a mental note to remember his name for when she makes another trip to the blood bank, hopefully he becomes a staple to her diet.

  It’s a Saturday morning, which means that Petra is without anything to do. There is a curious temptation to use the vast hours of the day to explore her body, but lingering on that thought causes Petra to recoil for reasons unknown to her.

  Petra pulls out her phone to begin scrolling through her vast feed of news and information. It was an old habit she picked up when she was a child— she tries to recall more about such things but finds herself unable to discern the details of her childhood.

  Petra takes another sip from the bag, and shrugs. Oh well.

  On a local forum there was a link to an article published only half an hour ago. There had been a murder st night. It wasn’t uncommon for there to be such things in Chicago. Statistically speaking there has been at least one a day. What intrigued Petra was proximity, the death, a currently undisclosed male victim, was killed just down the street in a diner.

  It was a slightly sobering thing to read— that such a thing could and did happen so close to her, scared her. Although she was still unsure how someone would go about killing her now anyway. If the sun couldn’t kill her, how many other myths were there?

  On top of all that Petra couldn’t help but feel, at best indifferent to learn that he was dead, whoever he was, and a deep part of Petra felt like she knew, or should know who he was— at least in some capacity. It was another block in her memory.

  Those kept interrupting her, and it was starting to bug her. Petra took a final moment and drained the remnants of liquid from the bag. The burst of crity from the blood caused Petra to come to the conclusion that it was simply a morning sickness of some kind. So, perhaps against her better judgment Petra decided to shelf her brief concerns.

  It wasn’t much longer until Agatha had made her presence known in her apartment. She slumped out of her room and dragged a bag of blood out from the fridge. She grabbed the handle to a cupboard and yanked it open, revealing a swarm of mugs inside. Agatha slipped her fingers into the hold of a brown mug and pulled it down onto the counter. She was halfway through emptying most of the bag into the mug when she zily gnced up and noticed Petra sitting on the couch. Wordlessly Petra provided a friendly wave.

  “Lu…” Agatha bit her tongue. “You seem like you’re in a good mood.”

  Petra looked at her friend, her head tilted slightly to the right.

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Petra asks.

  Agatha doesn’t say anything for a moment. Petra can see Agatha’s eyes darting between Petra and her mug. Her eyes linger for a moment on Petra before Agatha squints slightly.

  “Well given how st night went I figured you wouldn’t be in such high spirits. You do remember st night, right?”

  Petra once again returns to her hazy memories. The events of the previous night appear in a sporadic abstraction of visions. The more she tries to focus on any particur event the less clear it becomes. All she can clearly recall is going to the blood bank with Agatha and then going to some vampire bar— which she didn’t think she had a good time at.

  What ever happened at that bar must have been the reason she should be upset. Petra didn’t want to pry, she trusted her instincts to avoid the topic of the previous night, what ever might have transpired.

  “Yes?” Petra slowly says, her ck of confidence in her answer btant.

  A loud beep goes off and Agatha pulls the hot mug of blood out of the microwave. She sprinkles into it some kind of powder. Petra stares at the container and gleams the edges of a few words— “instant coffee”. Petra recoils slightly at the idea of bloody coffee; Agatha takes a sip.

  “Somehow I’m not convinced of that,” Agatha says in-between bouts of coffee.

  “No. No I totally do, it just took me a second is all,” Petra says quickly. “We got food then went to a bar.”

  “And after that?” Agatha looks carefully towards Petra.

  “We came back here and slept. Thank you, for sharing your bed by the way,” Petra says happily.

  Agatha makes a face that Petra is unable to figure out. The two sit in the quiet. Petra shifts about on the couch cushion.

  “Right, sure,” Agatha finally says. “And is there anything you feel the need to tell me?”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Petra’s face once again returned to a confused expression.

  “Nothing, never mind,” Agatha swirls around the coffee blood.

  Petra can’t help but feel that Agatha is hiding something from her. She is tempted to ask but before she can Agatha excuses herself and sequesters herself back into her room.

  Petra for possibly the first time in her life, she’s not entirely sure, decides she’s going to go for a morning walk. The day seemed like it would bring welcome weather and Petra desired to bath in the warmth of the summer sun. Her not very stylish sungsses would be earning their keep this morning— why did she buy such generic looking lenses? She should know better.

  Petra pushes herself off of the back cushion and rolls up off the couch onto her feet. Before she could set off on an epic stroll around the city she would need to put her clothes from yesterday on. Hopefully they hadn’t gotten too dirty from the bar.

  The door to Agatha’s room is pushed in after Agatha gives the all good for Petra to open it. Petra turns and stares down at the sad pile of clothes that she allegedly called her own. Allegedly because they were not the clothes Petra remembered wearing, she was sure she had on a skirt, but the pile in front of her was nothing more than a pair of jeans and a shirt with a shark on it.

  Agatha sees out of the corner of her eye and looks up from her book.

  “You good? You’ve been staring at that for like ten minutes,”

  “Yea, great, never better,” Petra slowly reaches down and begins picking up the clothes.

  She makes her way out of the bedroom and into the bathroom to change. She knows their both girls so it wouldn’t be that weird to change in front of her but Petra doesn’t feel like she’s earned that yet.

  Petra sets her apparent clothes beside her and begins to take off the pajama shirt she had borrowed from Agatha. She stares for a moment at her reflection. It seems off in some way. Ever so masculine in all the wrong pces. This wasn’t what she actually looked like, right? Clearly this mirror was incorrect.

  Her brow line protruded out. Petra’s jaw was rough and angur— the skin clinging tightly to the bone with no care for softness. Beyond her face her chest was all wrong; it was wide, slightly hairy, and where her breasts should have been there was nothing, just sore, slightly puffy nipples.

  And her waist was all but non-existent.

  Petra looked away from the mirror, she couldn’t handle its lies anymore. Her breathing became heavier. She looked down at her body herself. She traced her fingers around her body; feeling the betrayals of her face herself, feeling the tufts of course hair stab at her fingertips. Her skin was course and irritable.

  Petra looked at her underwear and prayed that what she would find underneath would truly be hers and not some cruel facsimile. Her hand slid in-between the fabric and her skin and she let out an audible sigh of relief.

  Petra turned away from the mirror, her back up against the counter top. Her legs buckled and Petra slid down the counter onto the floor. Her hands trembled.

  Petra snatched the shirt off the floor and hastily threw it over herself. She needed something to cover herself, at this point she didn’t even care what. She did the same for the jeans.

  Petra’s head rolled the side. The curtain to the bathtub was pulled back. A piece of red fabric poked just above the wall of the tub. Petra sat up onto her knees and shuffled her way closer to the tub and peered in. There bathing a pool of chemical was a skirt and a blouse.

  That’s what she was wearing yesterday!

  Why were they covered in blood. Did she spill blood on them again?

  Petra pulled the blouse up out of the bath and gently wrung it out. She examined the blood that seemed to be concentrated around the colr. Trace drops streak across the blouse like they dripped down onto it from above.

  The skirt didn’t seem to have as many stains as the blouse did. It was only speckled with blood, like it had just been quickly misted with a spray bottle of blood. Petra rubbed at a few and the stains seemed to fade fairly easily.

  Petra spun the skirt around in her hand. On one of the rotations Petra noticed something poking out from the pocket. Petra carefully pulled it out, it was an incredibly saturated piece of yellow lined paper, It was a miracle the thing hadn’t completely dissolved by now.

  There was something scribbled out in ink at the top. The ink had become incredibly smeared but Petra could just faintly make out what she thought were the words “Maria, call me”. Below the letters were a series of nigh unintelligible numbers, her phone number.

  Petra pushed the name Maria around in her head, did she know a Maria? She quickly stopped, probing around in her mind quickly gave her a disaster of a headache.

  Petra grabbed her phone and opened it up to her notes app. She sat there beside the tub deciphering the smudgy numbers for an unknown time; could have been minutes or hours, she didn’t know and she didn’t care.

  Finally Petra had scraped together three different numbers. One of them had to be the correct one. Petra typed out an identical message to the three numbers.

  “Maria? This is Petra from st night”. She hoped she told Maria her name, otherwise this already shot in the dark would even crazier.

  Petra sat leaning against the tub staring at her bnk phone screen, waiting. Waiting for any sign of response from the three numbers. Twenty minutes ter, her wish is granted. The first number had texted back…

  “Oh thank god! Are you ok? Are you safe?”

  Pasta-Gal