As if my dreams hadn't been weird enough already, I had to find Inspiration, Dreams & Ash, a blog by Marian, a classically trained (I think) musician who recently discovered blues and jazz. So far, so normal. She landed on my radar by writing one of those "Woe is me, something didn't go right tonight" posts musicians occasionally lapse into. Also normal. The concert was at Orchestra Hall, apparently, and while the audience was enthusiastic, Marian felt it was average at best, and was extremely put out because she had bought box seats for her friends. Marian is apparently rather wealthy; Marian is also a vampire. And here we break with normalcy.
Piecing this together, it looks like Marian started playing jazz and blues, and later entered into some sort of vampire-centric group. A boy seems to be at the heart of the problem. (I say boy because, despite Marian buying a box of seats, she sounds like she's in college, and much of this takes place on campus.)
"To make a very long and intricate storey [sic] short, a group of people much like us got in too deep with some supernatural phenomena, and literally were trapped onto the campus. Leaving always involved an accident or something mysterious to prevent that person from leaving. They had decided to read from a book (almost like a spell) only it brought to life something seemingly evil and sentient."
We then stumble into her denial phase:
"I am dodging the lynchpin [sic!!!] of this whole insanity. I mysteriously refer to the damned and being damned, but the horror of this situation keeps me in partial denial of my new form. I can't possibly stay in denial due to the requirements of maintaining my new form, but it's easy to try and forget as I record my experiences.
Essentially, Darius not only took my heart, but my life. It could be poetically rendered as the "kiss of the death". It was a damned good kiss though."
A denial phase marked by traces of noirish writing.
She then starts to get comfortable with it, that fairly nasty business of chomping down on a jugular:
"It's been difficult already to balance my feeding to keep my personal promise to not take more than a human should have to endure, and to make it as pleasurable as I can for them, but I'm getting more of the hang of it...especially with Darius' help."
That same month, she begins playing concerts for vampires at the Discarded Image, a club I haven't heard of. (This blog is on record as supporting these sort of guerrilla outreach efforts, but really hadn't considered the essential rightness of reaching out the supernaturally inclined until now. Marketing departments, take note.)
We then find her rebelling against the leaders of her coven (or vampire group? ensemble? An exaltation?) She settles on something called the Carthian group.
"I really liked the head of Carthians, Walt Barowski. He seemed much more in touch with reality and the current world, not the ancient times of Merlin and King Arthur. I liked him enough to realise I could go Carthian except for my overwhelming interest in the secrets of the Dragons that will help me remove this Vampiric nature, or, at least tone the "needs" down to something more controllable."
The leaders of this group are Barowski, and the (mostly) lovable old lady Rowen.
This is followed by a turf war with werewolves over who controls the blues club B.L.U.E.S., who then meet to discuss their differences like the families in The Godfather, or something:
"Despite the tenseness of our meeting, I think we were all pleasantly surprised with how agreeable we actually were, including the Werewolves. Hank and I headed up the talking, since our ability to negotiate and "impress" had vastly increased with our new abilities, and I played to light up the place and put everybody in a good mood."
Of course she did. The vampires and werewolves are now in alliance with each other, which should help everyone sleep at night.
The vampires took a trip to Michigan in the middle of February to Mackinaw Island, the farthest northern point of Michigan not in the Upper Peninsula. (And this is where my friends will accuse me of an April Fool's prank, since my family used to go there for vacations, but that's a coincidence.)
Marian then wraps up with the post about playing in Orchestra Hall, and if anyone knows who she is, please let me know. There are no CSO Chorus members with the name Marian. I already checked.
(I know the timing is suspect, but I couldn't come up with this as an April Fool's joke. This woman knows way too much lingo for me to contrive it, and I've had a fear of this sort of occult stuff since I was a kid. When I was 7 or 8, I was literally too frightened to go upstairs in my Grandma's farmhouse after watching a sitcom about a possibly vampiric uncle. And C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters did a number on me. When I worked at Borders, I did just about everything I could to keep from reshelving books in the section with all those H.P. Lovecraft books.)