The next morning, Cammie and Alyssa were waiting for me in front of the Ancient Hall. You might think Alyssa could take some vacation in the hospital, but she likes the place as much as she likes the needles.

"Viiiiivieeenne!" Alyssa screamed my name as if it was the end of our civilization. She skipped down a few staircases and spread her arms out, intending to give me a bear hug as she normally did.

"Noooo!" I cried, holding my hands up to stop her. Alyssa came to a sudden halt.

"What?" She shrugged quizzically, looking a bit hurt. But I also felt my face blushed in shame.

"Alyssa," Cammie came from behind her, "I think it will be easy for Vivienne if we start a no-hug rule." Cammie saved me the explanation. Alyssa's face fell as she came to realize it, too. She's always been a big hugger among us, but she nodded understandingly at last. I didn't mean to spoil our happy mood but being a little too different also hurts a little too much sometimes.

"Alright!" Cammie tried to cheer us up, "Isn't it great? We're besties again!"

Then we made our way through the hall, I didn't see Jacques anywhere in the school. But I guess I didn't want to face her now, and definitely not when I was with Cammie, she still had a hard time with her anger management.

Another period passed, then another. I still didn't catch a glimpse of Jacques. For a particular reason, I wasn't sure it was a good thing. She might be around somewhere sucking people's energy, but let's hope she listened to my words.

After the end of morning classes, we went to have our lunches as usual. Conversations hovered in every corner of the hall. I tried to pick up bits and pieces from their daily talks, but no surprising news today. I decided that nothing was wrong at the Ultara Academy after all.

Cammie and Alyssa were debating on whether or not to assassinate Jacques if she drained anyone out of energy again. Cammie was on pro (which didn't surprise me) but Alyssa was on con. That was weird because Alyssa wasn't supposed to be a pro-peace, especially since she was the first victim among the three of us. Alyssa acted as if all the stuff she had gone through was just the bad flu. But somehow, I had noticed the change in her. Alyssa looked quiet, in a more serene manner than she had ever been before as if she was holding secret thoughts or feelings.

Then we reached our lunch table and sat down. Finally, I was in my own place. It felt like I had found my way home again. As my two best friends were deeply engaged in their conversation, I started munching my lunch. But before I knew it, Alyssa had brought back her same old curiosity about my diet, except this time it was me as a representative of vampires.

"Are all vampires violently allergic to garlic?" she asked. I guess she didn't find it odd to talk about vampires in the middle of everything, but if you saw some nerds walking around the campus with handmade magic wands and told you that they had been practicing witchcraft, then talking about vampires is just as harmless as talking about the weather.

I looked at Alyssa and smirked. Then I picked up a piece of garlic bread from the basket and took a big bite of it in front of her.

"And you still can eat human food?" Alyssa gawked at me with wide-eyes.

"Of course, I can. I'm not dead!" I said, striving to keep my voice low. "Any living vampires would be so darn scrawny if they lived on blood alone. Well, unless they're the turned ones."

"Why?"

"Because they're dead people," I said. "Blood works like a charm to preserve them. The same way you preserve dead creatures with formaldehyde, so they can live as long as they continue to feed on blood. I guess they've gone through fossilization."

"So they're like walking fossils or something?" Alyssa asked.

"We call them the undead or walking dead, but never walking fossils, Alyssa," Cammie told her. Octavia had told me about the undead vampires. Those vampires are hungrier and more untamed than the living ones, but not as strong, and they normally serve the true-bloods who created them.

"Do vampires afraid of holy water, then?"

"Trust me, they can even bath with it," I answered.

"So can vampires fly?" She made a wing-flapping motion with her hands like a bird. I rolled my eyes. I meant, do I look like I just walk straight out of a horror novel or what?

"Alyssa, I think you have trouble separating facts from fictions. If any vampire jumps off the building or bridge, they will fall," I told her plainly. "It's that whole gravity thing you learn in physics, remember?"

"Oh, rat!" she said as if my inability to fly was against the natural law.

But when my hand grabbed for my milk carton, it scooted away before I could touch it. I thought maybe I was too hungry that I started seeing double, so I made a second attempt to grasp it again, but this time I wasn't hallucinating or anything. The milk really did move by itself. It started skittering toward the edge of the table and hovering in the air for a second before falling onto the floor.

I yelped at the scene (I don't know if vampires should be afraid of ghosts). There were no other ways to explain it. I stared wide-eyed at my dropped dead milk carton. The white creamy liquid was spilling out from the opening, but I was too scared to pick it up.

"Di—did—did you see that?" I squealed, pointing shakily to the carton on the floor.

"Oh yeah," Cammie's voice also sounded alarmed. "Your milk carton just did a bungee jump."

And in case you don't know, Cammie speaks in metaphor only when she is confused, and it takes a lot to make her confused. So obviously, I wasn't the only one who saw it, and that was the scariest thing of all. I was about to question whether there was any spooky history in the Lunch Hall. Suddenly I heard a low sound of snicker coming from behind me.

"Oh, you dropped something, Vivienne," Jacques said, walking toward our table. She smelled of wild flora and fresh cut grass like she had just walked out of the wood, but the irksome smugness never left her face. She stooped over and picked the empty milk carton off the floor. She looked at it like it was the most unimaginable thing on earth.

"Oh, you drink milk?" Jacques asked.

"It's none of your business!" Cammie growled, standing up from her chair.

"That's very interesting," Jacques said as if she didn't hear Cammie.

I snatched the carton from her hand, "I'm not like you."

Just like that, she glared at me dead in the eyes. I expected that she was going to hypnotize me or make me go crazy. Instead, her voice echoed in my mind.

'You know nothing about me, you blood-sucker!'

I was about to snap back at her, but then I caught myself. Jacques wasn't speaking. She hadn't actually voiced a single word. I blinked so hard in surprise. That was no way I could read minds. Then Jacques turned to walk away from our table. I stared after her. Alyssa managed to pull Cammie onto her seat again. I sat down, still distracted. I heard Jacques's thought, or maybe she let me hear her thought, and I had a feeling that Jacques was also responsible for my spilled milk.

"What did she want from us?" Cammie hissed. I was going to say 'energy' but that wasn't really true since none of us passed out in her presence.

"Maybe she just wanted to get an inside scoop of my diet," I found myself saying after I realized what Jacques was really up to. "She's been watching me for a long time."

"And she could cause your milk carton to take a nosedive?" Cammie asked.

"Maybe," I shrugged. "She's a psychic vampire."

"How the heck could she do that?"

"Psychic phenomena, I guess?" I said. And I kind of expected Alyssa to start spouting some scientific mambo jumbo, instead, she just shrugged.

"So much for the law of gravity," she said.

"Next time I'll pound the crap out of her," Cammie vowed. Alyssa and I looked at each other with our raised eyebrows.

"Ugh..no! Not sexually, come on guys!" Cammie said.

"I think you guys shouldn't give her such a hard time like that," Alyssa suddenly said.

"Alyssa!" Cammie turned to bellow at her. "Has she brainwashed you or are you amnesiac? Jacques is a villain! She didn't even care to apologize to you!"

"But it wasn't entirely her fault," Alyssa replied. Cammie put the back of her hand on Alyssa's forehead as if to see whether she had come down with something.

"I'm fine!" Alyssa swatted Cammie's hand aside, "It's just that I was the one who followed Jacques."

"Oh, I'm positive that she must have used compulsion or some witch spells on you," Cammie said.

"No, that night when I found her, she looked so tired, she could barely walk," Alyssa told us, and I could feel that she wasn't defending Jacques either. Alyssa was speaking the truth. "She had tried to walk away from me but I followed her... until..."

"Until she got her battery fully recharged from you, that is," Cammie completed.

"Right," Alyssa admitted softly.

I remember what Octavia had said, 'she might be one of those people who was born with a need for energy'. So it's just like people have to eat foods, or in my case, breast milk. Jacques was no better off than me. Now, I began to realize that I was lucky to have milk as a substitute. But being a succubus, Jacques might not have any choices. Well, it's not like she could suck energy from a refrigerator or anything. Needless to say, she had to feed off people. And if you think about it, it's even considered as natural to her.

I heaved a loud sigh, staring at my empty milk carton on the table.

"It's okay, Viv," Alyssa said, probably thought that I was still fussed over my spilled milk. "I'll bring you another one from the counter."

"Thank you, Alyssa," I said in a miserable tone. "But that won't do."

Alyssa looked puzzled, but Cammie whispered something into her ear. And I saw her eyes shone as she tried to get her mind around the idea. But I was already dreading that my day might be longer than usual.

While we were walking back to our classes, I was desperately trying to call Mom, I truly needed another milk supply, but she couldn't be reached at the moment. A nurse picked up her phone and said my mom was in the operation room. And I was fully aware that I couldn't get through a day without my special drink. Unlike Octavia, I almost depend entirely on the boost I get from it. I ran the tip of my tongue over my teeth, making sure my fangs still stay hidden inside my gum. I prayed they would be like that for the rest of the day.

In Biology, I sat alone. Octavia didn't come to school today. She told me she had some arranges to run. Ms. Grace unrolled a long poster of a cutaway human, a bright red organism with lungs and heart exposed from the chest. All network of blood vessels, nerves, muscles, and bones structure of a full-grown man with a yellow brain. I got this throwing up reaction immediately.

But nobody seemed to shudder in disgust like I did. For most of us, staring at these disturbing images is a routine. But it would have been better if Ms. Grace chose another day to present about human organism. My stomach was doing its best not to growl aloud in class. For a moment, I wished Octavia were here.

"That's how you look," Ms. Grace said, pointing to the picture. "Even sometimes we seem so horrible on the outside, but our insides are the same. We're all connected, all coexisted, even the beasts and us. Whatever you see, the ocean, the plants, the animals and the insects, all these things evolved long time ago from the same gas and dust of dying stars, scientists like to call it 'energy', and all of us are from those distant stars in the sky. So here we are, sitting in this classroom. We're part of everything and everyone, even the ones we dislike."