An Occult Experience

Chapter One

Alea Iacta Est





The evening was not going quite as Dice had planned. It had begun harmlessly enough, or as harmlessly as first dates ever begin. The atmosphere had been perfect: romantic candlelight, soft classical music in the background, the soft chatter of other diners…

Now, the candles had long since been blown out and the soft music was eclipsed by the sounds of the other diners’ screams. Dice ducked as a second wineglass flew over his head to shatter on the wall behind him, squirting purple liquid all down the pale green wallpaper. Dice winced. Yet another restaurant he’d be banished from… this was starting to get old.

“Come on, Clair,” he attempted to reason with his none-too-pleased date, who was leading the restaurant-goers in their screaming panic. He dodged another airborne piece of tableware—a plate this time. “You didn’t—oof!” Silver napkin ring. Right in the stomach. “You didn’t think I was this bad when we met at the coffee shop!”

“Y-you’re a vampire!” Clair shrieked back. She was a pretty brunette with flyaway hair and legs as long as the Nile. A little on the spacey side, admittedly (the coffee shop they’d met at had never been intended for human use, but Clair evidently hadn’t noticed anything amiss), but that didn’t detract at all from her natural prettiness. So it was a real shame that she was trying to kill him.

“Well, yeah,” Dice admitted, shrugging and rubbing his stomach ruefully. He didn’t see what the big deal was. It wasn’t like he’d tried to drink her blood, or anyone else’s for that matter! All he’d done was politely decline to order dinner for himself. He was still paying for Clair’s food, so what was she complaining about?

Of course, she might have been one of those humans who objected to vampires that didn’t immediately identify themselves as such upon introduction. Dice found that idea ridiculous, not for any privacy reasons, but mostly because any idiot could tell just by looking (though humans rarely did). From a distance, he looked just like any human teenage boy: his blond hair perhaps a bit on the long side, baggy clothes in muted shades of gray and black, and a perpetually disinterested expression.

The only giveaways were subtle things like red around his irises instead of white, a slight flush to his cheeks, pointed incisors, and, oh yeah, the fact that he salivated, sweated, cried, and ingested other peoples’ blood. As a matter of fact, the disease vampirism itself involved replacing every one of the affected’s bodily fluids with blood, thus the red irises and skin. His eyes had been blue before he’d been infected, but had now clouded to a highly odd-looking shade of purple as a result of this. That alone should have been slightly telling as to his true nature.

Of course, these were all superficial aspects anyway, since any vampire stupid enough to plan someone’s murder by taking them on a date first was just begging to be shut away for life on homicide charges. Dice was not in jail, QED he did not feed off humans. What really mattered was how he lived, which was, for all intents and purposes, exactly like a human. He went to high school, hung out with friends, went on dates with girls, and even had a part-time job!

And yet, somehow his dates always found a way to turn it back around on him, like he was some kind of monster for daring to have caught a contagious (blood-borne, ironically enough) disease. And, invariably, the turning-back on him was followed by some sort of panic attack or homicide attempt. Or both at once.

Speaking of which…

Dice barely managed to dodge the knife that zipped past his face. Another well-known ‘fact’ about vampires was that they all possessed mythical healing powers—which were, of course, myths. He may have bled someone else’s blood, but his pain was just as great and prolonged as any human’s. This had to stop before someone actually got hurt.

“So I guess it’s safe to say that I won’t be seeing you again?” Dice asked. Just in case.

Clair’s enraged scream followed his hasty retreat out of the restaurant and rang in his ears as he sprinted away down the darkened street.



***



Daniel ‘Dice’ Jokull was not a hippie. He may have been a teen in the sixties (a fact that he didn’t advertise much, due to the modern era’s scornful outlook of that time period), and his parents may have fit that definition, but Dice was certainly not one of them. He had carefully modified his speech and wardrobe as the years went by, unlike many cool cat throwback vampires he knew who refused to believe that Elvis was dead. Dice liked to think of himself as an adaptable, twenty-first century teen.

Therefore, it was only natural that he did not want to go back to school. Especially not after his forty-year break between tenth and eleventh grade. No, sir, Dice was a free man and intended to stay that way.

Unfortunately, the law begged to differ. The eighties had seen some big law reforms regarding the inhuman races—who, in this age of political correctness, were called ‘minority species’. The nonhumans had finally made a stand for themselves then, demanding certain rights and tailored laws. And, ever-obliging, the government had agreed.

For the most part. Most of these laws had focused on vampire and werewolf hunting rights and other such human safety concerns. To Dice’s chagrin, though, some of them had touched upon the education system as it applied to the minority species.

And so it was that Dice found himself hunting not for blood, but for schools. Under the law, he had to finish his mandatory twelve years of education as well as additional year-long catch-up courses every three decades, to make sure he was up-to-speed with the current culture and its politics. The one bright spot in these vampire-specific laws was that they had not mentioned teen vampires’ legal adulthood. In which case, Dice—as a legal fifty-something-year-old—could continue to own his own house, drink alcohol, and vote (not that he did any of those anyway, but it was the principal of the thing that mattered).

In any case, it was nearly an entire year before Dice found a school he deemed adequate for his purposes (which were, of course, to learn as little as vampiricly possible before getting the hell out of town). It had been a grueling year of sensational adjectives and excessive exclamation marks on glossy brochures. A year of perky, plastic receptionists and so many tours of so many buildings that Dice had developed a deep-seated loathing for the architect that had designed them. Because surely there was only one—one sadistic little man who delighted in gray tile flooring, frosted plastic fluorescent light panels, and tiny, windowless rooms.

St. George’s Institute for the Inhuman had not impressed Dice with its website, and certainly not with its name—‘institute’ sounded uncomfortably like ‘institution’. It was one of the many, many schools for the minority species that had been founded in the Minority Rights Movement in the eighties. (It should be noted here that human minorities were not included in this movement, merely the nonhuman kind. Dice found it amusing how quickly mankind was able to reshuffle its priorities.) What drew Dice in, however, was not its above-average statistics, but the fact that it was a boarding school. This coupled with the fact that Dice lived in an old schoolmate’s basement had him scrambling to sign up for the weekend campus tour.

And that was the story of how Daniel ‘Dice’ Jokull found himself at the back of a tour group trooping into the entrance hall of St. George’s Institute for the Inhuman at nine o’clock on a Saturday. A.M.

Dice was the only vampire in the group. This wasn’t surprising, since only one out of every ten vampires were on the right side of the law with regards to assault, kidnapping, and homicide charges. Most preferred the freedom of their own perceived immortality to the restrictions of human laws. In front of him could be seen two gremlin thugs, a family of banshees, and a gaggle of giggly Goth djinni. Dice shook his head sadly at the state of the world where the phrase ‘giggly Goth djinni’ could be applied to anyone. Dice hated djinni. They were the source of almost every bad pick-up line in existence.

But Dice wasn’t focusing on them. He looked around the lobby of the high school in something approaching awe. It was more akin to an old-time train station than an educational facility, all marble and vaulting skylights. Students of all species rushed here and there, in and out of the many doors lining each gallery of the multi-level hall. The most attention-grabbing part of the place, however, had to be the mural just opposite of the main front doors.

Dice snorted a little. It was a familiar scene, if you were an art history buff. Still, he should have guessed that with a name like that, St. George’s was sure to have it prominently displayed somewhere.

It was, of course, a blown-up version of St. George Slaying the Dragon.

“Don’t the hydras object to that?” one of the banshees moaned sympathetically to her neighbor.

“No, idiot,” an eavesdropping gremlin snickered, his green Mohawk swaying as his head jiggled. “It’s a cultural thing.”

“Yeah, totally,” one of the djinni interjected. “I mean, like, would people at Harriet Tubman’s school get mad if there was a mural of, like, a plantation or something?”

At that moment, their tour guide turned to face them, having taken a position beneath the mural as if to be sure they noticed it. She was a hydra herself, Dice noted with a quick sniff. Her core body temperature was much higher than any other humanoid’s. The nametag clipped to her belt loop said ‘Opal Anthony’.

“Can you all hear me?” her chirpy voice cut through the irrelevant chatter. “Okay? Good, because I can hear all you.” She giggled. Dice blinked. He’d never seen a happy hydra. Not once. As a whole, hydras were a sullen, temperamental lot. They’d never really gotten over the dragon slaughters of the Medieval era, not even after they’d succumbed to modern times and undergone the transformation from ‘dragon’ to ‘hydra’ (which was a dragon with the ability to shapeshift into human form at will).

“Welcome to St. George’s Institute for the Inhuman,” Opal continued in her tour-guide voice. “I’m Opal, and I’ll be your tour guide for today. If you have any questions, feel free to just ask and I’ll do my best to answer them. First, though, a little bit about our school. St. George’s was founded in 1984 during the Minority Rights Movement by Dr. J. Blessing, a centaur visionary. Dr. Blessing made…”

Opal continued to regurgitate an almost word-for-word repetition of their webpage’s history section. Dice, having already read this and finding it just as uninteresting the second time around, tuned her out. The hydra girl either didn’t notice or didn’t care, because the tour continued without pause. The group was led through the lobby and down a few hallways of the main building while Opal pointed out a few rooms of particular significance. They soon found themselves outside, following a well-worn trail across campus while Opal directed their attention to this building or that one.

“…Chorus Room,” she was telling the banshees. “Specially soundproofed, of course, so the other students aren’t bothered at all. And right next to it is our Vampire Reeducation facility,” she added with a wink in Dice’s direction. “For old-timers looking to catch up with today’s trends and political goings-on.”

The djinni burst into high-pitched twitters of amusement, while the gremlins snorted. Dice blinked at them all until they turned back to the tour at hand. Not for the first time, the vampire cursed his coloration, sure that they all thought he was one of those shy-schoolboy types who blushed whenever a girl looked his way, now. Oh, well. It wasn’t like he was out to impress anybody. He was just there to serve his legally-required time and get on with his afterlife.

The tour continued in exactly the same mind-numbing vein that it had begun in. Dice supposed he saw the sense in including the special programs for every species in her speech, but that didn’t make it any more bearable for him. Their winding path took them past a sports field—one of those generic rectangles of grass crossed with faded white lines that could have meant anything and capped on either end with metal pipe-frames that could have been soccer goals or could have been abstract art for all the difference it made.

Dice spared the undulating accumulation of athletes a single, bored glance—just long enough to realize that they were either summer-schoolers or those who lived here year-round—before returning it to the back of the banshee in front of him. His hand crept into his pocket to finger his iPod, weighing the possible benefits of taking it out and employing it against the risk of missing something actually important in Opal’s lecture. He was still considering it when an irritating whooshing noise caught his attention. It got louder and louder, until even Dice couldn’t ignore it any more.

The vampire looked up just in time to catch a glimpse of bumpy brown rubber before a starburst of pain blossomed just between his eyes as a football drilled into his forehead. He barely had enough time to clutch his head and swear before a cry of, “I got it!” and a blunt object hit his ears and midriff, respectively. The boy fell backwards, a heavy weight on his stomach driving the breath from his lungs.

As he lay there, staring at the sky and gasping, Dice noted that, for some odd reason, the banshees had begun to wail in distress. The gremlins’ omnipresent snickers had died out, and Opal’s never-ending stream of words had finally fallen silent. From atop him, Dice heard harsh panting interspersed with apologetic expressions.

“Sorry, man… Didn’t see you there… Going for the ball… You okay…?” the weight shifted and disappeared from his midsection. A moment later, a gloved hand was thrust into the vampire’s line of sight. Dice didn’t need to see the film of crimson that he knew coated the skin just beneath that layer of leather to know that he’d been tackled by a hemogoblin. He could hear the blood, thick and strong, singing through the other’s veins. He could hear his own blood singing back. And he could feel his stomach add its own howl of hunger. Dice took the hand and levered himself up, paying no heed to the way the banshees’ calls ratcheted up a notch in volume.

Purplish eyes met concerned brown ones, watching in something like amusement as the concern morphed first into shock, then into horror, and then, finally, into abject terror. Dice’s gaze roamed. There was nothing obscuring the slick covering of blood over the hemogoblin’s face. The mogob took a nervous step backwards, clearly having noticed Dice’s blood-filmed eyes and recognizing him for what he was.

“Look, man, i-it was an accident,” the footballer tried to reason, his voice cracking. “I didn’t mean anything, honest. I’m sorry!”

“No, I’m sorry,” Dice countered, showing his teeth in an apologetic smile. The goblin flinched, and Dice shut his mouth quickly. “You alright?” His only answer was a jerky nod, but the vampire hadn’t expected anything more. It would take a suicidal kind of hemogoblin not to quake in the face of a vampire. They had been vampires’ prey for time out of mind, due to their skin’s sanguine slathering and the temptation it presented to those who subsisted on that liquid. Even now, the fear was present in all hemogoblins due to the average vampire’s tendency to disregard the legality of their actions before performing them.

Dice clamped his lips shut and bent over—the sudden motion causing both the hemogoblin and the tour group behind him to start—and scooped up the fallen football. He tossed it, watching the gloved hands wrap numbly around the object and clutch it to a red-stained shirt, as if the football could protect him from Dice’s wrath.

“You’d better get back to the game,” the blond bloodsucker inclined his head towards the waiting football team, who were looking on, aghast. “They’ll have a hard time playing without their ball.” This time, he didn’t even get a response as the hemogoblin turned tail and fled back to the pitch as quickly as his feet would take him.

Dice turned back to the tour group. The banshees had finally shut up, and had joined the djinni, gremlins, and hydra in gaping unashamedly at the scene before them. Dice lifted one eyebrow—a move that had taken twenty years to perfect—and stared back. The mutual gawking continued for several minutes before Opal gabbled out some inanity in a squeaky (squeakier) voice and began to quick-step backwards down the path. The others followed, turning their attention back to the tour in stages.

Dice sighed heavily and wiped his hand on his jeans—it had gotten bloody after touching the football, which had been covered in residual red stickiness. He’d never be able to wear these clothes again. Still, it was better than alternative. He doubted St. George’s would have accepted him had he done what most of his kind would have and brutally drained the poor guy.

The boy pulled out his iPod and pulled his headphones over his ears, cranking up the volume. He didn’t need to hear anything else. He’d already made his decision. This school had the largest campus he’d seen yet, which would easily accommodate any hunting he’d have to do (the old classmate whose basement he was currently residing in had become a tight-fisted miser in his old age, meaning that trips to the grocery store for a liter of blood were few and far between for Dice). It would also help with his unease around large groups of people. Not to mention the mystery of the happy hydra.

He glanced up, watching Opal Anthony’s sheet of honey-blonde hair shiver with the movement of her hips.

Yes, this definitely required further investigation.



***



The carpet was thin and worn from the hundreds of scuffing sneakers that had passed over it in its time of service. What had once been olive green fibers had been faded down to a wispy gray color. Likewise, the off-white walls were striped with faint but undeniable streaks of brown that, oddly, seemed to correspond with the average height of a teenager’s hands. Dust bunnies appeared to have fled to the ceiling for safety, far out of the reach of the apathetic masses beneath.

Dice took all of this in through the screen of thrashing guitars and screaming vocals. If there was one thing in particular that Dice liked about modern times, it was that people weren’t afraid of airing even the most edgy of songs over the radio, therefore introducing him to a whole genre he had been previously unaware of: death metal. Dice had never listened to another genre since. The boy adjusted his pack over his shoulder and glanced down at the paper in his hand, ticking off the numbers as they went by.

660… 662… 664… There. Room Number 666. He looked between his paper and the metal numbers a few times with his face twisted up, wondering if this was management’s idea of a sick joke. After a few moments of angry disbelief, he clamped his jaw tightly shut and took a few deep breaths. He reminded himself that he had made his choice, and it was too late to turn back now. He’d said his goodbyes; to go back now would be to face humiliation and a retelling of the story at every Christmas party from now until the day he died. He would be attending St. George’s as a live-in student, and this was where he’d be living-in.

All that was left was to meet his roommate.

Oh joy unbridled.

Dice took anther calming breath and inserted his key into the lock. He gripped the knob in his palm, feeling the cool metal against his skin, and twisted, shoving inwards. The door hit the other side of the wall with a bang as Dice strode confidently forward—his face a study in nonchalance—eyes already searching for signs of life. He came to a screeching halt, barely holding in a gasp.

Yes, he’d known that St. George’s was a wealthy school. Yes, he’d known that the architect had clearly had a flair for the unconventional (case in point: the lobby). What he hadn’t known, however, was the sheer size of the dorm rooms. The door opened up into a small, tiled kitchenette that was little more than a refrigerator, toaster oven, and stretch of counter beneath a few cabinets. Beyond that was a small living room area with a loveseat, a coffee table, and not much else. And beyond that were two doors leading to two closet-small bedrooms.

Dice rubbed his eyes in disbelief. It was, he decided, a continental apartment. Well, the bathroom was down the hall. But other than that it was practically self-sufficient. He took one step into the room and let the door swing shut behind him, still looking around in awe. His bag thumped to the floor unheeded.

He was finally brought back to earth by a sudden bang as one of the bedroom doors flew open. If Dice had thought his entrance had seemed casual, he was force to reevaluate it as the epitome of casual came striding into the living room. This, he supposed, was his roommate. Purplish eyes looked him over critically.

The boy was tall, but not thin or gangly. His skin was the tanned bronze that many girls would gladly commit murder for. He looked like a jock; probably something like soccer or lacrosse or hockey—he wasn’t wide enough for football. A wide grin graced the boy’s face. It was more the look of someone greeting a long-lost relative than someone meeting their new roommate.

Creepy…

“Hey, there!” Tall, Tan, and Friendly exclaimed. “You must be Daniel Jokull. They told me you’d be coming today.”

“Didn’t you just arrive today, too?” Dice asked, too confused to correct the use of his full name. The other boy shrugged.

“Nah. I’m one of the live-in students… Except that I live here all year round,” he said. “They let students without homes stay over the summer, as long as we work for the school somehow. You took the tour, right? Opal’s a junior like me, but she guides the tours so she can stay over the summer.”

“Oh,” the vampire could find nothing more to say to this. He wondered if there was some kind of brainwashing going on at St. George’s during the summer. Both of the year-rounders he’d met so far had been creepily friendly…

“Anyway, I’m Felix Goodfellow,” Dice’s new roommate shook his head and held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Daniel.”

“Call me Dice,” Dice shook the proffered hand.

“Sure thing.” Felix turned and waved a hand at the shut door. “You can take that room, since my stuff’s already in the other one. I’m out a lot, so you don’t have to worry about being bothered by me. You won’t even know I’m here.”

“Cool,” Dice said, for lack of a better response. The air wasn’t exactly awkward, per se—Felix seemed like the kind of obliviously cheerful type who wouldn’t recognize an awkward moment if it slapped him across the face and insulted his mother—but it certainly wasn’t relaxed. To escape it, the blond vampire snatched up his fallen bag and struck out for the room designated as his.

Dice eyed the bedroom. Small, of course, but clean. The vampire began to unpack his belongings from his nylon duffel with the air of someone resigned to a grim fate. Behind him, he heard soft footfalls. A quick glance showed that, yes, Felix was standing in the doorway watching him unpack.

“So, what decade were you turned in?” he asked brightly. Dice rolled his eyes. Typical, bland, getting-to-know-you conversation. Lucifer, how he hated it.

“Nineteen-sixties,” he mumbled back, shaking out a blanket and tossing it into a crumpled heap on the mattress. He braced himself. It was coming. Any second now…

“Groovy,” Felix smirked. Dice’s teeth slammed together. There it was. The pigeonhole. He continued to sort through the bag’s contents, pointedly not rising to the bait. Felix noticed.

“You don’t get riled easily, huh? That’s rare in a vamp.”

“So you admit that you’re trying to make me mad?” Dice asked. Felix shrugged unrepentantly.

“I heard about the hemogoblin incident from Opal. I was curious.”

“I didn’t kill someone. That’s the story. Nothing interesting at all,” Dice told him.

“Maybe,” Felix shrugged again before changing the subject. “So why do you go by ‘Dice’? I thought the sixties were all tree-hugging, peace-loving hippies. ‘Dice’ seems a bit…” he gestured vaguely, “…edgy.” Dice sighed.

“My parents were hippies, and they named me Daniel, obviously. My friends and I all gave each other nicknames based on vices like drinking and gambling to annoy them. ‘Dice’ was better than some of the other ones—” Boozehound, Roulette “—so it stuck.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” Felix shrugged. “‘Goodfellow’ isn’t exactly common, either, so who am I to judge? Anyway, what classes are you taking?” Dice tossed him his schedule, continuing to unpack while the taller boy looked it over. As it turned out, they had no classes together. After that had been determined, Felix announced that he was leaving to meet some of his friends for one last party before school began. Dice shrugged and grunted, and he left without another word.

Dice was soon finished; everything he owned fit easily into one duffel bag, after all. He threw himself back onto the bare mattress and stared blankly at the ceiling for a while, gradually realizing that he still had his headphones in. His ears hadn’t been sensitive enough to catch conversation over music this loud when he’d been human… He pulled them out with a more violent motion than seemed entirely necessary before returning to his ceiling-watching.

His roommate was a bit stranger than he had anticipated, but all in all things had gone surprisingly well, in Dice’s opinion. Now all he had to do was make it through two more years of high school and he was in the clear for another blissful thirty years of independence.

Two more years, he told himself. Then you never have to deal with these people again. Two years was nothing to an immortal vampire, right? Sure, every day was exactly twenty-four tedious hours just like it was for every other mortal on earth, but surely he’d become jaded to it after a century or so. Not that that helped him now.

Dice flipped over onto his face and quit breathing for a few minutes, to jolt himself out of whatever rut his thoughts had fallen into. He had made this decision. It was far too late to turn back now. He’d just get it over with quickly, like ripping off a band-aid, and let the chips fall where they may.

The Dice, he smirked into the mattress, have been cast.

Let’s just hope they don’t come up snake eyes.