Donor House: Alice: A Chinese Vampire

[k_a_webb]

Written for livejournal user ysabetwordsmith’s prompt: a Chinese person at the donor house who doesn’t speak English. I’m not entirely sure this was what she was looking for, but I hope it works.

“I need you help,” Nick said, when Alice picked up the phone. “I…” His voice trailed off and she knew without any doubt that he’d done something she would call stupid. “There was a vampire and…”

“Where are you?” she asked.

“We’re at the house, but we’re in the garden. I thought it was safer then bringing her into the house.”

Alice sighed. “Who is she?”

“I don’t know.”

She opened her mouth and then closed it again. Nothing she wanted to say would help the situation, so it was better to keep quiet than yell at Nick. There was always a reason why he did things, even though Alice didn’t always agree with his reasons, and she would wait until she heard them before she came to any conclusion.

“Explain.”

“I found her wandering around town,” Nick started, worry obvious in his voice. “At first I thought she was just lost, it’s easy enough to do if you don’t know the area, but then I tried speaking to her. She looked at me blankly before saying something herself and it became obvious that we weren’t speaking the same language. I didn’t want to leave her because of what she might do when she gets hungry.”

“Do you have any idea what language she was speaking?”

“She looks Chinese, so I’m guessing maybe Mandarin or one of the other dialects.”

Alice couldn’t help thinking it was probably one of the other dialects. “The only vampire we know who speaks any of the Chinese dialects is Lewis and he’s not in town.” She tapped her fingers on the table, thinking. “Bring her to my office. I may have an idea.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m pretty sure that you can cope with one female vampire if she decides she’s going to for one of the donors.”

“Alice…”

“What?”

“Thank you.”

Smiling, Alice hung up. She wasn’t sure she would have done the same thing if she’d been in Nick’s position, and that probably would have been a mistake, but sometimes the stupid things he did weren’t really that stupid. With one hand she lifted the lid of her netbook. As it loaded she thought about why a Chinese vampire, with no English, had been left alone, especially when she just happened to be in a donor house town. It had been sheer luck that Nick had found her and that he’d made the choice to bring her back instead of leaving her. Alice tried to avoid thinking about the people who wanted to shut the house down, whether they were vampire or human, but there were times when she had no choice. A lone vampire could do a lot of damage and it would be easy enough to blame that damage on one of the vampires in the house. Everyone knew they took in all sorts of stray vampires.

After logging in Alice went to her favourite search engine. She typed in ‘dialects of Chinese’ and let it do its thing. The better known dialects would be easy enough to translate online. Her worry was that the Chinese vampire spoke one of the lesser known dialects, which made sense if she was being paranoid, and if that was the case she’d have to think of something else. Unfortunately she had no idea what that something else would be.

Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.

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[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>“I need you help,” Nick said, when Alice picked up the phone.<<

That should say "your" above.

On the whole, I like this story. I'm particularly intrigued that you've tied this in with the ongoing plot regarding attempts to shut down the Donor House. That's exciting, and a good match. I'd love to see more of this.