The Slayer Chronicles:  Raina

            It wasn’t long ago that my life was normal and I was normal.  There was nothing special about me.  I was just another average college student surviving off of nothing but top ramen and dreams of something better.  But then, in one horrifying instant, everything in my life changed.

            My name is Raina Odette Tracey.  It’s different, I know.  As a child I often wondered if my mom named me Raina because she was sad - as in shedding tears like rain - when I had been born.  It was like her soul had been crying and she took it out on my name.  Maybe that’s why she left me . . .

            It wasn’t until I was older and I found out that my name meant ‘queen’ that I actually started to like it.  It made me think that maybe there was some thought put into my name; even though the reality was that she had probably just liked the sound of it.  Nothing special.

Of course, around the time I started to like my name I realized that my initials spelled ROT - as in I was going to do nothing but rot in this God forsaken life I had been given. -  There was really no hope for me.

            I really need to stop reading so much into my name.  The truth is my life never truly began until I was twenty-one years old, so everything before then is really irrelevant, or so I’d like to believe.  As I said before, one day I was just a normal college student trying to get by, and the next I was a homeless bum on a greyhound bus to Los Angeles with little money in my pocket and a missing roommate on my conscience.

            Well, that was only partially true.  I knew very well where she was.  She was dead; killed by a vampire, but as far as the police were concerned she was just another college student gone missing after a wild night of partying.  Probably a victim of date rape who was left for dead in a crappy, abandoned house somewhere.  There were a lot of crappy, abandoned houses around my college.  I don’t know why I decided to go to school in such a small town anyway.  To escape all of the people I guess.

            The town wasn’t all bad, but it was definitely the last place I would have expected a vampire to be hiding.  Jessie, my roommate, had been an easy target.  She was known to bring random men back to our dorm room after crazy, drunken parties, but something about this one had not sat right with me.  I suppose I should have told her.  It would have done us both some good.

            So I know the rules.  When your roommate brings someone back to the dorm you give them their space.  We all have our own private bedrooms for a reason.  But when I heard weird noises coming from her bedroom - not her usual moans of pleasure normally heard when a guy’s over, but a serious cry for help - I had to go in.

            The guy she had been flirting with at the party earlier that night was hunched over her on the bed.  He turned at the sound of the door.  The room may have been dark, but the light from the hallway was more than enough for me to see that his face was covered in blood.  The idea of vampires existing was still a bit unrealistic to me so I immediately thought that this guy was some sort of wannabe Hannibal Lector.  If only I had been right.

            The vampire immediately came after me.  I tried to run away but somehow, in this time of panic, I managed to trip over my own feet and fall to the ground.  In the end this move was probably what saved me.  The vampire had been intending to pounce on someone who was standing up, but instead missed and joined me in a face plant to the ground.  He definitely wasn’t as smooth as those vampires you read about in stories.

            Reaching for the first thing I could find, I managed to pull the cross off of my other roommate’s door.  She was a big Christian and was probably on some romantic, sexless date with her boyfriend at that very moment.  If only I had been so lucky.

            Despite what you may think, it was not the cross or the power of Christ that saved me.  What saved me was the pointed edge at the end of the cross.  I jammed the jagged edge straight into the vampire’s heart, killing him instantly.

            Only moments after he stopped squealing in pain the most shocking thing I had ever seen happened.  This was the moment I realized that all of those things, those creatures I had always assumed to be fake - much like those myths of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny - were actually real.  This man, this human looking man, turned to nothing but ashes right before my eyes.

            I was just about to scream when a hand came over my mouth and a soft whisper entered my ears, “Don’t make a sound.”  Those were the first words my future leader ever said to me.  Edgar.

            As he sat behind me, keeping me calm, a group of people dressed entirely in black started to scatter around the dorm room.  One of them took out a small, handheld vacuum and started cleaning up the remains of the vampire - that’s right, you heard me correctly, a vacuum - while the other two went into Jessie’s room and wrapped her body in her sheets.  They carried her out like that while one more person came in with clean set of sheets that were miraculously the exact same pattern as Jessie’s.  I have no clue how they knew what sheets to bring there that night.  It’s as if they can predict death but they don’t prevent it.  Not all the time, anyway.

            As I watched these people I could not help but get a sense of familiarity with this scene.  I couldn’t’ help but feel as if I had met these people before.  The slayers . . .

            Tears started seeping down my cheeks as I watched them dispose of any evidence that my friend was murdered here.  Edgar removed his hand from my mouth so that I could catch my breath between large gulps.  He brushed the hair out of my face and leaned forward to give me a kiss on the cheek.  His touch was very gentle, like nothing I had ever felt before.

            “There, there little Raina.  Don’t cry.  Jessie wouldn’t have wanted you to cry.  Your mother wouldn’t have wanted you to cry.”  The way he said this sent shivers down my spine.  My mother.  How could he have known what my mother wanted?  The woman had taken off when I was only three years old and she had taken my father with her.  As far as I knew that was the story.

            Pulling away from this mans hold, I looked him straight in the eye for the first time.  He smiled at the sight of my face.  “Look how you’ve grown.”

            While looking into Edgar’s eyes I could not find anything familiar about him.  There wasn’t even the vaguest light of recognition.  He was nothing more than a stranger to me.  “Who are you?”

            Before he could answer me, one of the people called to him and announced that it was time to leave.  With a look of disappointment, he slyly took a small piece of paper out of his pocket and slipped it into my hand.  Leaning in to give me one more kiss on the cheek, Edgar whispered, “If you can find me, I’ll explain everything.  Goodnight little Raina.”

            He released me and slowly made his way to the door with the other people.  As they started to walk out I heard one of the girls ask him if he had given me the drink.  He nodded his head and continued out the door.  The girl took one last glance at me and my perplexed face before following him out and shutting the door behind her.

            And just like that, I was alone.  They had gone just as quickly as they had come.  I looked around the dorm.  Everything was as it had been every day since we moved in.  My roommates cross was hanging back up on her door with no blood stains or scratches, the carpet had no signs of dead vampire dust.  I peeked into Jessie’s room.  Her bed was exactly the way she had left it that morning, messy and rustled up.  She never made her bed.

            I stood up and took a few steps inside, flipping on the light switch.  A picture of the two of us hung above her bed.  The picture was taken at freshmen orientation, the first day we met.  She had ducked behind me, hiding from two boys who were trying to throw her into the pool.  In the end we both got thrown in.  A resident advisor who was taking pictures for some bulletin board asked us to pose as we were climbing out of the pool, so we did.  We’d been friends ever since.

            Jessie was my only friend.  People often thought I was weird because I listened to classical music and didn’t talk much, but not Jessie.  She thought all of the different little quirks about me were interesting.  And when other people asked her why she was friends with me she would always say it was because we got each other.  It was true.  No one knew me better than her and no one knew her better than me.

            Jessie was the only reason I knew anybody at this school.  She was the only reason I had the courage to talk to boys and had any dates.  She would joke that I was pretty enough that guys would look past my lack of a personality.  I never told her but that actually hurt my feelings.  Having no personality is my biggest fear.  I know mine isn’t very strong but I like to think that I have one.  If I had told her that she would have stopped.  I guess I’ll never get the chance to tell her now . . .

            Looking around her room it all didn’t seem real.  I had to have been dreaming.  There was no proof to suggest otherwise.  I did have a lot to drink that night.  That must have been it.  I got really drunk, came back here, and passed out on the hallway floor.  Yes!  That had to be it.  Right when I convinced myself that this was what had happened I felt something in my hand.  A small piece of paper.

            My heart stopped.  I lifted my hand and took a look at what I was holding.  It was a business card.  On the front in some fancy red, cursive letters it said the word “Slayer”.  I turned it over to see what was on the other side.  It was a quote:

            “May love for the light conquer the fear of the darkness.”

            Interesting.  But how did that man expect me to find him by that?

            A few days passed but my life stayed completely still.  I kept watching our front door, expecting Jessie to walk through at any moment, but it never happened.  My roommates were convinced that she ran off with that mysterious stranger everyone was talking about from the party the other night.  That’s the thing about small colleges, people gossip at them just like they do in high school.  Especially in the dorms.

            I wanted to tell them that I knew the truth, that Jessie’s mysterious stranger was a vampire and that I had killed him, only it was too late for her.  But I could never tell them.  If I did I would be one step closer to the loony bin.  I’d probably end up there one day anyway.

            Finally, one night while I was sitting at my desk trying to study for a biology test I had the next day I found my mind drifting to that man.  He knew me.  How did he know me?  Throwing down my books, I stood up and started pacing around the room.  I grabbed the sides of my head and began shaking it, throwing it back in agony.  I couldn’t take it anymore.

            Stomping back to my desk, I frantically searched the drawer I had stuffed the card into in hopes of forgetting about it.  I tried to throw it away but for some reason I kept taking it back out of the trashcan.  Once I found the card way in the back of the drawer I jumped on my computer and searched the word ‘slayers’.  6,650,000 results.  Damn.  This wasn’t going to work.  Taking a closer look at the quote I decided to type that in instead.

            Only one result.  Now that was better.  I thought for sure the quote would lead me to some religious cult’s website, but instead it took me to the last place I’d ever suspect, a Myspace page.  It was someone’s headline.  I clicked on the link.

            On closer inspection I noticed that the main picture on this profile was of a tattoo on someone’s back with this exact same quote, but the profile was private.  All I could see was the main picture, the name, which was Slayer K, the headline, and the location, which was Los Angeles, CA.

            Los Angeles.  I hadn’t been there in years.  It wasn’t really my kind of town.  It seemed like that man had led me to a dead end.  Los Angeles was a little big for me to be wandering around endlessly looking for him.  It was a lost cause.

            I closed my computer and threw the card back into the trashcan.  I wasn’t going to be able to get anymore work done tonight so I turned off my light and went to bed.

            Two hours later I woke up and pulled the card back out of the trashcan.

            Two hours after that I woke up again and ran to my computer.  Within minutes I had bought a bus ticket to L.A.  What was I thinking?

            The ticket was for 5 p.m. tomorrow.  I still had time to talk myself out of this.

            The next morning I woke up and did my routine: a quick bowl of cereal before class, then off to my biology test, a quick coffee before my next class, then off to Public Relations, and finally an hour at the gym.  I loved college life.  I was done with my day by two.

            Back in my dorm room I did my best to avoid my bedroom, starting with a shower.  Only bad thoughts existed in there.  That lasted for about an hour.  After giving up on my evasion I quickly ran into my room and took my duffel bag out of the closet, throwing as much as I could into it.  I ran to the bathroom and gathered up all that was mine.

            Within an hour I had everything packed and ready to go.  Before packing up my laptop I sat down at my desk and typed an email to my parents.  Well, not my real parents.

            After my parents abandoned me I was put into foster care.  When I was six I was adopted by a nice young couple that were having trouble conceiving a child of their own.  The doctor told them that there was only a fifteen percent chance they would ever have a child.  She had already had two miscarriages in the last year and a half so I was their solution.  Two years later they defied all probability and had a baby together.  Shortly after that I became nothing more than the child they weren’t quite sure what to do with.  They didn’t need me anymore but they couldn’t just get rid of me.  I wasn’t a puppy.

            Despite my bitterness towards them, I still felt I should at least let them know that I would be leaving school.  After all, they were good enough to pay for my education.  A consolation prize for missing everything else in my life.

            The email was short.  I told them I had to leave for personal reasons and wasn’t sure if I’d be coming back.  They could do as they pleased with my things.  I also told them to say hello to my little brother Tyler for me.  He was the only one in the family I actually did get along with.  Only another year and a half until he would go to high school.  Poor guy.  It was all downhill from there.

            Once the email was sent I turned off my laptop and packed it into its case.  At 4:30 I heard my roommate come in the door.  Right on time.  I ran out to meet her in the hallway and asked her if I could get a ride to the bus station.  She agreed and continued walking to her room to drop off her backpack.  She didn’t even bother asking why.  It didn’t really matter.  We weren’t exactly friends, but we tolerated each other okay.

            Before we left I made sure to grab the card off of my desk and stick it in my back pocket.  A half hour later I was on the bus to L.A., wondering what the hell I was doing.  At that point I was convinced that I had gone completely insane.  There was no turning back now.  I was going to go and find the slayers no matter what it took.