Keen's Turn: The Vampire's Appeal

Chapter 1: Steps to Ward (second half)

If you're new here, please find the story at its new home (also in the comments): https://www.wattpad.com/story/318690675

✶✝ If anything feels inauthentic, feel free to let me know. Also, this isn't meant to be a religious story, any more than Dracula can be said to be a religious story, so please, don't take it too seriously in that regard.

Also also, I understand some people see random unsightly indentations in some of the chapters. If you'd like to lend me your iDevice so I can see and fix them, message me for my home address. ✶✝

A static of music came first. Jared moaned and reached for the alarm clock where it tittered under the bed, but it was lodged in the precise center of the springs supporting the mattress, as close to him as possible without being in reach of his fingertips. He pulled the pillow over his head, a wave of drowsiness sweeping him under.

One of the school gang's a wolf. Gotta make sure it's not Rose. Hurry. Hurry up. Before the guards come. Castle guards. Got orders to take me alive.

Now where was he...?

Rose was there, with that shining grin she reserved for the times he wasn't being an idiot, but now there was another noise—a beeping, so annoying—Lou had materialized and was beeping about newspaper orders. He was across the room, but Jared pushed the pillow harder over his ears and went back to Rose, who was floating over the bog. He really needed to explain how dangerous that was.

He had almost reached her when there was something irritating, like a car alarm, bleating, blaring, trying to distract him—where was he? Orderlies. Yes. Castle orderlies. It was hot now, and hard to breathe.

A ringing came next—tinny, insistent, difficult to blot out. His nose was full of bedsheet. But Rose was important. He groaned and kicked the blanket down. Mustn't be distracted. Rose had to know, before the fever came. He had to tell her—

A fifth distraction started, a proper clamor, a metal monstrosity with a tiny hammer whizzing between two golden bells. The one the neighbor complained about. Jared sat bolt upright, eyes closed, and launched the pillow at the alarm clock, but it was angled under the cabinet legs where it couldn't be stopped.

He collapsed forward into the blanket, searching for Rose. The metal monster could be ignored. Like that noise was going to work—!

Going to work.

Shit.

Jared sat up again, hair matted over his eyes as though it were put on backward.

What time is it?

He staggered off the bed, nearly turning his ankle in a pile of laundry, and stumbled across the room, rubbing his eyes open to squint at the tinny alarm on the windowsill.

Forty minutes behind. He could still make it if he left now, but if he was late again...

Lou is gonna flip shit.

He kicked the hammer alarm off, the other four having since given up, and shucked off the dress clothes he'd fallen asleep in, grabbing his jeans off the desk chair and searching for fresh socks.

Fuck.

They'd gone missing again.

As he went to throw on a clean shirt, his eye caught on the red cord around his wrist. Struck by a sudden idea, he fingered it, and took a moment to separate last night's reality from dream.

That...really happened.

Shaking himself, he made to finish dressing, Aunt Judy's favorite expression echoing in his head.