The near gallon of coffee Lucas had drank throughout the day barely seemed to do anything. You would think a constant supply of caffeine would ensure that he would at the very least stay awake through work but Lucas' body would tell a different story. In his not quite four hour shift at the architecture firm he worked at Lucas had managed to fall asleep five different times. To the point where after the fifth time the project lead, Adam, pulled him to the side.

  "Lucas are you doing ok?" Adam asked.

  "More or less, I had a bit of a strange night, got attacked, didn't get a lot of sleep," Lucas said.

  "I suppose that would expin that gnarly cut on your neck," Adam said.

  Lucas had been itching at the scabs all morning, they were peculiar in a way he couldn't quite describe. Their mystery only deepening when Lucas tried to think about what could have caused it.

  "Look, Lucas, you've been a great help recently with the Cooper's building and I really don't want the documents to be a mess just because you had an day where you couldn't focus. Go home, get some sleep, you look like you need it. I'll rearrange my schedule today to try to pick up the things you needed to get done, don't worry about it. Just promise me you'll get some rest and come in tomorrow actually functional," Adam said kindly.

  Lucas had been working at Miller & Davis for a few years now and they had always had a more comfortable work environment, very x, which for the architecture industry was a rarity. It was one of the reasons he wanted to work there in the first pce, to the point where he kept applying whenever there was an opening. But he still felt guilty whenever he took advantage of the policy.

  Lucas reluctantly returned to his desk and retrieved his bag, packed with his ptop and a few notepads. The caffeine was wearing off again and Lucas found himself barely able to escape the walls of his office. The knowledge that his brain would no longer need to focus on monotonous construction details meant he had just enough energy to will himself onto a bus and into his apartment where he promptly colpsed into his bed.

  ***

  Lucas was walking through a rge cavern. There were numerous tunnels that branched deeper into the stony void, but Lucas remained on the easiest to traverse. The air was moist, crisp, and stale. Water was dripping from the walls and collecting into murky red tinged pools. There was something else in the cave with him, somewhere in the darkness, rodents, or bats, maybe a few samanders, Lucas had no way of knowing but he knew something was there.

  The cavern terminated, a solid earthen wall prevented Lucas from traveling any deeper. He turned around to leave the cavern but the path had morphed into a cliff-side. An endless drop stood before him. Lucas stared for an eternity into the inky pit before him. A shadowy figure emerged from behind Lucas and embraced him gently. The figure leaned sensually into Lucas' ear and whispered in a soft frigid breath.

  "Jump". Lucas didn't react or move he just continued to stare into the pit. The figure whispered again.

  "Jump. Join me". The figure fell into the pit and pulled Lucas with them.

  Lucas was underwater yet it felt no different than the air. He floated lifelessly to the surface. At the other side of the pool the shadowy figure was floating. Their form became clearer, a woman, dressed in a bck gown. Her clothes seemed unaffected by the water, as did his own. He swam over to the woman.

  "How nice of you to join me," The woman swam to meet Lucas in the middle of the pool.

  She pulled Lucas towards her, as their bodies grew closer their clothes faded from their forms. She wrapped a leg around him and held him tight. Within her arms.

  She descended upon his body with a super-sensory precision. Lucas felt waves of heat pulse throughout his body, rich and warm, they were a pleasure beyond pleasure. But it was not to st, the woman's gentile touches had soon warped into a sick dispy of power, cwing at his back, carving up his skin. Her lips bared teeth which gnashed and tore through his flesh.

  She pulled them beneath the waves and Lucas felt his lungs be crushed then flooded. A thickened mixture of water and blood churned inside his lungs. He struggled to stay a float. He kicked and fought at the woman but she was too strong. His muscles rexed and Lucas' mind began to drift. The woman brought Lucas close one st time imparting a drawn out kiss before she relinquished him into the depths.

  ***

  When Lucas woke the next morning he was already running behind. Thankfully he wasn't as tired as he had been the day before but there was a general ache that pgued him that morning. As he stared at his reflection in the mirror while he was brushing his teeth, his eyes found their way to the scab on his neck. Lucas blinked a few times, he must still be waking up, he thought. There was no scabs to be seen or even a mark, dent, or scar.

  He noticed it again ter, it was just bnk, clean, as it had been a week ago. The toothbrush went sck in his mouth; he reached up and ran his hand all around his neck but just like his eyes had seen nothing he felt no blemishes or scars. Had he hallucinated them? Lucas, after all had practically no sleep the night prior and it wouldn't be the first time he had hallucinated something while sleep deprived.

  He must have.

  Lucas ran out the door to catch a train south for The Loop. On the ride Lucas returned his attention to the previous day and a wall seemed to sm into him. He had ended up in someone's apartment. A WOMAN's apartment. How in God's green Earth did he manage that? He could hardly hold a conversation with his friends or coworkers, yet somehow he managed to weasel his way into someone's apartment. No, that definitely proved his point, he had some sort of bad trip. Somebody must have spiked his drink when he wasn't paying attention. Lucas had heard that was something people did and because it would neatly solve the mental spiral he was falling down he accepted it graciously.

  Clearly Agatha was some weird dream manifestation that his brain cooked up in order to convince him he could talk to people. And since Agatha wasn't real neither was her apartment or that cut on his neck. And any and all conversations about said cut were simply incorrect.

  Lucas let out a long sigh and gathered what ever sembnce of composure he could muster.

  As Lucas stood to leave the train a wave of nausea washed over him. He tripped over himself and tumbled onto the concrete. It would seem his streak of poor circumstances was to continue. Thankfully the rest of that day did not create any additional problems.

  When Lucas walked into work the following day Emma, one of the interiors he was working with, kept staring at him throughout the morning. Just before lunch she came up to him.

  "Are you feeling well?" Emma asks.

  "I feel fine, why?"

  "Well you just look a little sickly, is all." She shrugs a little. "I just got over a bug a few days ago hopefully I didn't spread it to the rest of the office."

  "No, I think you're good. Well at least I am," Lucas ughed slightly.

  That evening at home, while he was eating dinner he kept accidentally biting his tongue. Since the other day his teeth had felt a little off, maybe they had shifted slightly and his tongue's muscle memory was being thrown out of whack as a result. Before bed, while Lucas was shaving, as he always did. He noticed that Emma seemed to have a point that morning. His skin did seem a little paler than usual.

  The following day while Emma was stapling documents together she accidentally pricked her finger on one of the staples, drawing a few drops of blood. It was a strangely potent smell to Lucas who could smell it all the way from his own desk. He had shot his attention towards the smell almost as soon as he sensed it. His stomach grumbled a little, he should probably find a snack to tide him over till lunch.

  Whatever he had for lunch did not agree with him. He spent a good deal of time in the bathroom in the ter half of the day. He felt miserable. On top of that even more people had begun to comment on his sickly appearance. Lucas didn't think it was that bad but maybe he should see a doctor.

  Lucas thought back through the week to try to trace what he might have contracted. He certainly didn't have whatever Emma had that was a mild cold at worst. Could be a stomach bug of some sort. That would expin why after eating he felt even worse even though his diet hadn't changed at all.

  He was on his way out of the office for the day when he passed Adam.

  "I see your cut is all healed up. That was pretty fast, if I had something like that it would have taken weeks. You're lucky," Adam ughed.

  "Mmhm," Lucas made a vague mumble of agreement. His eyes shot open and began darting back and forth while his thoughts began to race.

  Adam remembers the cut, that means it was real? If that's true then... he only started getting sick after the bar, when that woman essentially kidnapped him into her apartment and kept him there for hours while she watched.

  "What the hell did she do to me?" Lucas whispered.

  Instead of going home that night Lucas headed straight to the apartment building he left several days ago. Up until now he had convinced himself it was some eborate hallucination, but that couldn't be the case if someone else remembered parts of it.

  Lucas arrives at what he was pretty sure was Agatha's door, apartment number 72. He was a jittery mess his body had been running on adrenaline for nearly an hour now and it showed no signs of slowing. He pounded on the door.

  "Oh hey Lucas good to see you..." Agatha says as she opens the door. "You look... different? Oh shit..."

  "What did you do to me?" Lucas pushed his way into her apartment.

  "Look I didn't mean to I was hungry, I hadn't eaten in hours. I thought I would be ok but the alcohol clearly did not mix well with an empty stomach."

  "So you did do something to me!" Lucas yelled. "Was it poison? Did you inject me with some weird poison through my neck?"

  "Huh, I suppose from a certain point of view I did in a way," Agatha paused slightly and said in a casual but contemptive manner.

  "Why the hell would you poison me! Are you insane!?"

  "No like I said I'm sorry I was just hungry. I swear I didn't mean to bite you. I thought I barely nicked you, you should have been fine. That night you were fine, this doesn't make sense," Agatha told him, she began pacing her living room and started biting her fingers.

  "Will you just stop being cryptic for the love of god and just tell me, what did you do?" Lucas demanded.

  "I think I may have accidentally turned you into a vampire," Agatha said.

  "What?" Lucas said.

  "A vampire, you know 'I want to suck your blood'. Vampires," Agatha said, she was panicking now along side Lucas.

  "Vampires aren't real!" Lucas yelled at her, getting uncomfortably close to her.

  "Unfortunately they very much are," Agatha had taken a few deep breaths and was trying to focus.

  "But I can't be a vampire, I have a job, I have friends, I have family! You've turned me into some horrible monster," Lucas said.

  "That's offensive, and also I have job, I have friends, I'm not some crazed freak just running through the streets of Chicago feeding on people. We have solutions for that," Agatha said.

  "We?" Lucas said.

  "Other vampires, we're everywhere, just don't like to make ourselves to known because of reactions like yours. And we don't just kill people, that's highly frowned upon, although there are some that unfortunately do do that." Agatha was still slightly manic and not entirely in control of her words.

  "You're crazy! This is crazy. I'm calling the police," Lucas pulled out his phone and began to dial.

  Agatha snapped towards Lucas and pulled his phone away before he could finish, and she held him by his shoulders. "Look you need to calm down, I know this is a lot to take in and I'm really sorry this is happening to you, but it's too te I already tried to prevent it as best I could and it clearly didn't work," There was a sincerity in her voice that Lucas didn't want to believe, but he did.

  Lucas took several deep breaths, trying to steady his shaking body.

  "Good, now please sit down, I'm going to get some blood, you seem far enough along already that it will probably do you some good. If I'm right anything else is likely to cause severe indigestion,"

  "I have been having stomach problems the past week," Lucas whispered. "Thought it was just bad food or I was unlucky."

  Agatha went over to the fridge and pulled out a bag of blood. Lucas didn't get too good of a view but there seemed to be dozens of bags in there.

  "Did you steal those from a hospital?" Lucas asked

  "No it's all ethical, I buy them straight from a blood donation company. Lots of us do." Agatha handed Lucas a gss that she had filled with the blood.

  "Are you sure this is safe?"

  "Most likely, you'll be able to tell instantly if it's not. And if that's the case please don't cough up blood on my furniture."

  Lucas cautiously raised the gss to his mouth the metallic smell permeating his nose, the smell was oddly intoxicating. He tipped the gss back and the tiniest drops of blood began to trickle onto his tongue. The taste was sweet? If he closed his eyes he could imagine that he was just drinking honey, before he realized the gss was empty. He felt calmer but began ughing hysterically.

  "You must be joking, this has to be an eborate joke right. This is like dyed honey or syrup or something right?" Agatha was just staring at him sad but caring look on her face.

  "Lucas no. That's blood, from a person. I'm really sorry Lucas, I didn't mean for this."

  Lucas' brain had officially short-circuited. The walls of reality had begun to colpse in on him. His senses shut down, a void enveloped him.

  This isn't real.

  This can't be real.

  This won't real.

  Vampires were immortal, they were timeless, never-changing, creatures of the night. Lucas would be stuck in this stupid useless sack of flesh for eternity.

  Pasta-Gal