"Yeah. Well, from the website. Anyway, I think maybe there's a thing going on and I think maybe it has something to do with the fact that I'm suddenly way stronger than I was a couple weeks ago? So maybe Zeke is telling the truth and I'm a vampire slayer, even though this is straightforwardly insane."

".....can you prove that you are supernaturally stronger now."

"On it." 

She's not superman-strong. She can't lift the livingroom sofa one-handed. If she balances it right and puts some effort in, though, she can lift it over her head before gently setting it down.

"See?"

"Um. OK, yes, you are correct, that's super weird. We should not call the government because they will take you to an underground facility and do experiments on you."

"I don't think the government really does that. Probably."

"OK, well, we're just not gonna take any chances with that, OK? I need to - we need to talk about this but first we need to eat hotdogs."

So they eat hotdogs, and they talk over Karen's plans, which mostly involve more research and some espionage and pulling together the money for some martial arts lessons. Azalea informs her that they shouldn't be desperately hurting for cash after their parents' will is all handled, so she probably doesn't need to get a job. Getting a job on top of school and on top of whatever this is would probably be too much.

She spends the next few weeks on research and espionage and confirming that Zeke genuinely has neither a reflection nor a pulse. She begins taking karate lessons. She's scared of trying to take on a vampire by herself, so she doesn't go out of her way to go to any of the dangerous places, but she does start taking walks around town at night with a wooden stake in her hand, looking for anything suspicious.

Suspicious noises are emanating from that alley over there. They sound... bitey.

Her suspicions are roused.

She rounds the corner, stake in hand.

A short girl with pale blonde hair has pinned a much bigger man against a wall and hauled him down to her level so she can bite his neck. He looks about ready to faint.

She could just, like, try to rip the girl away from the guy's neck? Augh, that seems really sudden - Karen she's in the middle of killing someone -

"Hi!" she blurts. "Oh my gosh, dad?"

Aaaaaaa what is she doing.

This does successfully cause the vampire to stop mid-feed and turn around, half-laughing and half just confused, to see who's talking.

She looks at Karen. She looks at her meal, whom she is still holding against the wall one-handed. She looks at Karen again. She seems to be having some trouble reconciling Karen's words with reality, perhaps because the man looks absolutely nothing like Karen in any respect. Her confusion is sufficient to distract her from the much more important information that Karen is a teenage girl holding a stake.

Karen would die of embarrassment, but she decides that she can put this off until after she's pinned the vampire to the alley wall and plunged a stake through her heart. Because that is what you do when you encounter people in the middle of murdering other people, probably.

She lunges. 

The vampire is taken completely by surprise and barely has time to squeak before she puffs into dust.

The big guy faints.

"Shit," she hisses, swallowing the curse halfway through because she doesn't actually want to be the sort of person who curses.

"Uh, I'm gonna - call 911," she says, more to herself than to the guy. She doesn't have a cell phone. She bangs on the nearest door that looks like it might have people behind it.

Someone opens the door a crack and peers suspiciously out at her.

"What?"

"Hi this guy collapsed you don't need to let me in can you please call 911 though - "

"Sure." The person issues a muffled instruction over their shoulder that definitely has 'collapsed' and '911' in it, peers suspiciously through the crack one more time, and then shuts the door in her face.

She goes back to the guy and tries to stop the bleeding - she should have done that first thing, idiot, it should have occurred to her to study first aid, is he even breathing?

He is breathing, and bleeding in mildly but not urgently alarming quantities.

OK. She can try to stop mildly alarming bleeding until the paramedics hopefully come. And also toss her stake in the bushes, where it is retrievable but not visible. It would be super weird to be the only person with a bleeding guy and to also be holding a stake.

Emergency services take an honestly deplorable amount of time to arrive, but they do show up eventually. No one questions her presence, or what happened to the unconscious bleeding man's neck; they just load him up and cart him off, with a sincere but perfunctory thank-you for her efforts in getting him some help.

This is fine; she didn't get into this to be recognized for heroism. She got into this because there are VAMPIRES.

Who are killing people, but who also don't have to kill people. There must be any who're worth saving - she thinks Zeke is worth saving, and if Zeke's fundamentally worth saving then surely basically all of them must be fundamentally worth saving, right, even if they're in practice pretty awful?

But she's fifteen and she's armed with a wooden stake and there's only one of her, and there are a lot of superpowered serial killers in this town.

She heads home and spends the night being vaguely upset about things. She visits Zeke's crypt in the morning.

"Hi, c'mon in," he says, lurking ominously in the shadows. (A little ominous shadowy lurking is kind of unavoidable when you're a vampire in the daytime.)

She comes in. Without shutting the door until she's looked around the room and made herself pretty sure that there aren't any other vampires hiding in the shadows. Zeke's firmly in the "friend" category in her head, but he's also in the "people who might unexpectedly try to kill me sometime" category, so she still feels like she has to make sure that sometime isn't now.