by R. B. Fields
I felt this underlying malevolence in the air the night my mother was killed. I knew it was coming, the air laced with panic and blood. And I had done nothing.
I won’t make that mistake again.
I close my eyes against the malicious wind.
I ride with him into the dark.
4
Dawn
I don’t think I fell asleep, but when we finally turn off the main road and up the driveway toward his house, it seems as if we’ve been on the road a long time — as if we’ve traveled not only over miles but over years. That sensation of him being far older than I am is probably true, I realize, and it makes me feel that much younger in comparison.
The difference is, one day I’ll die.
Hopefully not today. But the surroundings are very “horror movie-esque,” and as a pretty girl with a decent rack, I’m probably first on the kill list. Enormous oaks encroach on the long gravel drive, a tunnel of leaves and wood, the shadows full of watchful eyes.
Silas parks the motorcycle near the house, and I climb off the bike, my spine still vibrating like I’ve been sitting on a washing machine for an hour. Everyone acts like they’ve never tried it, but that’s bullshit — it might be mostly unsatisfying, but it’s a decent way to kill a spin cycle. I look around, stretching my aching legs, but my thighs are the least of my concerns. My arm is still on fire, my head throbbing; my shirt is wet, too, blood sticking my collar to the back of my neck. At least my vision has improved — probably not a concussion after all. I draw my gaze to the house.
White marble steps lead to a wide wraparound porch, but this is not the type you’d see on an old plantation. Each step is one half circle atop another, the walls mirroring the long oblongs straight up to the roofline … if you can call it that. There are no shingles that I can see, just great sweeping white. Even the windows appear curved. “I bet it’s like living inside an egg.”
Silas laughs, and I startle. In the light from the porch, his eyes are an even brighter violet than they had been on the bridge, and now that my eyes are working again, the rest of his features come into clearer focus. Shorter blond hair on the sides, longer on the top, straight nose, wide, heavy jaw. Very Sons of Anarchy. No wonder I followed him back here — I don’t even have a washing machine at my place. But even as I think it, I hear my mother’s voice shouting inside my head: “Stop making jokes just because you’re nervous. Pay attention — he could still kill you. Any man might.”
“It is like living in an egg,” he says. “But that helps us; there are no corners for the others to hide behind.”
“The other what?” But as soon as I say it, I know — vampires, duh. But I realize I’m still waiting for him to clarify. Are there other creatures out there that even vampires are frightened of? Some alien being with gnashing teeth and blood on its claws?
“Vampires,” he says, and this makes the muscles in my shoulders relax. At least I know what a vampire is.
“So is it just the lack of corners, or is the shape of the house or the material like … a hex? A spell?” I don’t know anything about witchcraft — my mother was animate about avoiding silly pastimes when there was real evil in the world — but he’d mentioned witches earlier. And now I know that “real evil” exists in places outside the human realm.
He narrows his eyes. “Not exactly.” His voice has gone cold. I’m not sure what I said wrong, but I suddenly don’t want to feel alone here with my only ally staring at me as if I’ve grown another head. “I’m Dawn,” I say, and offer him my hand.
His face softens. His teeth are white, sharp, but normal-looking. No fangs. How the hell does that work? Do they just snap down like a mousetrap in time to tear someone’s heart out? I open my mouth to ask but freeze as a heavy thunk cuts the air — the door. Yellow light spills onto the driveway and turns Silas’s hair into a halo.
“What did you do?” I whirl around. The man in the doorway has long hair the color of ink, and eyes just as black, lips full and ruby-red. If someone asked me to draw a picture of a vampire, he’d be it. He’s even dressed in black: black jeans, a black shirt too fancy to be a T-shirt … maybe silk? And he looks angry. I want to shrink back, but Silas is standing behind me, nudging me forward. “This is Draynor,” he says.
“Of course it is,” I mutter. If someone asked me to name a vampire based on every stereotypical Dracula-type character, I would have come up with something similar. But oddly, he doesn’t scare me — the melody of Draynor’s voice, even angry, has a soothing quality to it. Like a lullaby.
Draynor frowns — his eyes bore into mine. “Of course what is?”
Silas chuckles in my ear, and the sound sends chills along my spine, a dance of gooseflesh and breath that makes my whole body tingle. But he still has blood on him. I have blood on my shirt, too, but that’s mostly mine. Wait … will this cause a frenzied attack, like a drop of blood in a piranha tank? Will the vampires still hidden inside the house come after me like sharks? “Maybe I shouldn’t be here,” I say, but I can’t pull my eyes from the dark stranger in the doorway.
“You should,” Silas says in my ear. “We share everything — we have no secrets. And they can help.”
Silas is a palate of hard stone at my back, but I’m certain that if I turn and tell him to take me home, he will. He might resist, might tell me I’ll die, but I’m not trapped here — I have a choice. But once I go into this house, once I cross that threshold … it’s over. I’m not sure what exactly, but it feels like the end of things, steeped in permanence. Maybe because I can never forget what I now know. I can never again pretend that what I see in the shadows is only a reflection, my imagination running wild. From this point on, I’ll always know that every overstuffed chair could be a creature lurking, ready to take me. Ready to drain me. And what I might learn beyond that threshold … it might ruin me.
I imagine the bodies of those women, their rib cages splayed open. I feel the line of soreness along my throat. I wasn’t afraid of that man when he was a person, serial killer or not, and it is an odd twist of fate that the only way to feel secure against a vampire is to have your own vampire posse. But if Silas is right, I’ll be attacked out there — it’s stay here, or die in a ditch with my insides on the outside.
I’ll take my chances with door number one.
I square my shoulders and step onto the first step, then the second — my shirt sticks to my skin, sweat, or blood, I’m not sure. “Nice to meet you,” I say, but I think Draynor can tell I’m lying. And there’s still one question nagging at the back of my injured brain: Why does Silas want to help me, a lowly human? I’m not much good to them. The only thing that keeps me moving up the steps is the knowledge that if he wanted me dead, he would have thrown me off that bridge. And if he wanted to eat me, he would have done that too.
“You’re injured,” Draynor says in his sultry melodic bass — one step from Barry White. He looks back at Silas. “Who was it?”
“Mikael.”
“Did she — ”
“No. He gouged her, but I don’t think she’s infected. Her wounds would be healing already.”
Infected. I pause two stairs from the porch. Is that why I’m here? Did he think I was going to become … one of them? At least it sounds like he believes that risk has passed.
Draynor scowls. “You’re going to start a war,” he says. “If we leave her here, they won’t follow. Perhaps best to end this tonight before it goes further.”
He’s telling Silas to let me go — to let me die — but his voice is so smooth, so calming I don’t even care. What is wrong with me? Waning adrenaline? It’s like I’m fucking stoned.
“Eventually, they will come for us — she isn’t the one who killed Mikael,” says a new voice from the doorway. Less rugged than Silas’s Sons of Anarchy vibe, he’s smaller than the others but still well over six feet, sporting the rock-hard shoulders of a gymnast, with short brown hair, deep amber eyes, and the fine-boned features of a Calvin Klein model. Thirty
-five, maybe forty, but a well-kept forty; he moves like a cat, sleek and stealthy, and his black and grey Einstein T-shirt is slightly at odds with the guitar he has clenched in one hand — strong fingers. Shouldn’t one of them be ugly? Was that part of the package? You had to be undead, but you got to be hot as shit? But there is something in his eyes … the closely held sorrow of some deep loss, and I feel him as a kindred spirit. I have found that pain tends to recognize pain.
“They’ll know it was us,” the guitar-toting vampire says. “One of us. And they won’t know which one; they don’t have a Psychic. Mikael turned a bunch of meth heads to build his hive, and they aren’t any more productive in death than in life.”
Meth heads? That sounds like a shitty eternity. I’ve treated overdoses at the hospital, and if there’s anything worse than the acrid stink of chemical burns and rotting teeth, I’m glad I don’t know about it.
“They might figure it out, but we’ll be gone before they get here, Kain,” Silas says.
Kain, Draynor, and Silas. And wait … gone? They’re leaving? He brought me here in the middle of the night, running from a fucking vampire clan, just to leave me here instead?
“We’ll just take her with us.”
Kain shakes his head. “Too dangerous. Hide her.”
Hide me. In the egg house with its curved windows and its weird steps.
“They’ll smell her.” Silas stares at Kain — he’s still in the doorway, silhouetted by the yellow glare of lamplight. “You smell her, too, intensely — you both do. And I can’t read her.”
What the hell does that mean? But something’s wrong; I can feel it like needles on my back — like eyes. Watching me. I step back down the stairs, beside Silas, and look up at the house, but all I see are three stories of curved cement and convex glass.
“Can you feel her, Draynor?” Silas says.
“Feel me? I’m not even touching him — ”
Snap!
I jump, but it’s just something in the woods, the cracking of a branch, probably an animal shrouded by night. But … what if it isn’t? Do the vampires seem concerned? They’d know better than me if we were in danger now, right?
I drag my gaze from the trees. Draynor’s already staring at me with his obsidian eyes, and though I know he hates me — has to hate me if he wants to leave me behind to die — my anxiety melts away into a warm calm as if I’ve wrapped myself in a heated blanket and swallowed a pocketful of Valium. But I’m not tired. Is he doing this?
Draynor squints, blinks, then turns back to Silas, and the warmth vanishes — I’m left cold, gasping. “Whoa. Can you do that to my neck? My throat’s kinda sore, gotta be honest.” I force a smile, but it feels false even to me. Why are we standing out on the driveway when we could be inside the magic egg house not listening to the crackling of branches at our backs? As if on cue, another series of quick snaps echoes from the dark shadows beyond the tree line.
Something’s there.
I turn my back to the house and watch the woods, the gray lines of the trees, the wavering underbrush. I move my hand to my hip — to my knife.
“You’re trying to make her sleep, right, Draynor?” Silas says. “But you can’t. I’m not sure why she’s immune, but she is.” The shadows beneath the trees move in a wave, too much undulation to be the wind, and I feel no breeze against my cheeks. Silas doesn’t seem to notice. He stands with his back to the woods and goes on: “What’s the worst that can happen? They’ll kill us at the cottage instead of here? I killed one of our own. They’re going to come after us — there’s no way out of that, not now. Not for me. You'll have to leave me too.”
I pull the blade from its holster; the handle is already hot. “Guys … ”
“We’re with you, brother,” Draynor says. “We have no choice.”
They’re still talking. They can’t hear me. They aren’t listening.
The shadows explode into chaos.
I crouch in a defensive position, blade at the ready as a wave of dark creatures pours from the underbrush, though I can’t immediately tell what they are in the shadows. A mass of vampires army-crawling toward me? My shoulders tense, my vision locked on the creatures on the drive, my knife at the ready — come at me fuckers. But …
No, not vampires. Rats. They emerge onto the moonlit driveway, racing toward the halo from the porch light as if they all suddenly heard the same Pied Piper song. I straighten and back toward the porch, I can’t stab fifty rats at once, but Silas is already pulling me toward him, putting himself between me and the hoard — tense, but not afraid. What the hell is going on? Is this a common occurrence in the world of vampires? Maybe. It’s common enough in a New York subway.
The rats veer left, away from us, and vanish once more into the shadows beyond the driveway, but the hairs on my neck rise anyhow. It’s not Kain, he’s gone, back inside the house, but Draynor is glaring … at me. The last rat races over my boot and follows the others toward the property beyond the drive.
Draynor finally drags his gaze to Silas. “You’ll obviously have to keep her away from Markula.”
“Who’s Markula?” I ask. Is he worse than an army of rodents?
“Don’t worry about him,” Silas says, his eyes still on the place where the rats vanished. “Let’s go inside.” But the tone of his voice makes my blood run cold — he’s worried. I look back down the long tunnel of a driveway, at the spot where it all ends in shadow.
Is there already a monster out there waiting for me? Probably.
I guess I’ll have to sharpen my knife.
5
Markula
A deep rumbling vibrates the air and the pads of my fingertips. The big cat looks up at me with eyes the color of molasses, his fur black and shiny as glass. He rubs his bull head against my thigh — straining to be near to me.
The front door closes with a clunk, and I draw away from the window. The cat follows, but his ears prick at the sound. He growls.
He doesn’t like her either — Dawn — though he won’t leave my side to seek her out. I smelled her before they let her inside. I smelled her before they entered city limits. She’s beautiful, I’ll give him that, the type of beauty that used to get a woman paired off to the biggest landowner in the region. Once, I was that landowner, every father fighting for my favor, begging me to take his daughter. But none of those women had the ability to put me in danger.
No, this isn’t going to work. She can’t be here. She’s dangerous, I can sense it, like any good hunter would be able to, and not only because my powers don’t seem to work on her — I can’t see inside her, not the way I see inside the cat at my side. I can’t anticipate her next moves, can’t watch the firing of brain and tendon. I can’t see anything beyond her perfect flesh, the curve of her breasts.
I can smell nothing but her blood.
That smell is dangerous, too, far too intense — it should not hold such power. We’ve trained ourselves not to leap on every human that passes by, and though that struggle can be a beast in and of itself, I do not have to fight it. Never do I taste sweat on my tongue from this far away. The others surely feel it too; they’ll all be intoxicated by her scent.
Which means I’ll have to take care of her myself.
She might have felt me watching, uncannily perceptive for a human, but she’s not that quick. And she’s not a hunter. Not like me.
None of them are like me.
I make my way toward the middle of the mostly empty room — trivial pleasures mean little. I like to say the abandonment of material goods is merely a leftover from my last years as a human, the time I spent in the seminary, but I know it’s more than that — it’s an utter lack of joy from human things.
They make me sick.
The cat rubs against my leg again, and I pat him once more and point to the door. He sits and stares at me with doleful eyes. Animals should be free, not trapped in a house, but soon enough, he will get hungry and beg to run from here. Unless I give him the woman — he’ll
tear her apart in seconds. It is not the worst idea, but that knife she pulled when she heard the rats coming … I do not like the way it glinted in the light from the porch, as if the blade itself felt my presence and had a vendetta. And I feel far more connected to the cat than to any human — I do not wish him harm. Humans are more likely than any other creature to cause suffering for sport.
No, I’ll not send the cat her way. Not tonight. Tonight … I’ll consider my options.
An enormous four-poster bed looms in the middle of the room, and I sink onto it, my head on the black duvet, the cat at my side. Mirrors cover the entire ceiling. The eighties were a strange decade, but this I do not mind. The mirrors remind me of who I am.
As if I could forget.
The skin of my cheeks is sunken, ghoulish in the thin light from the lamp. My eyes are brilliant red flames. I peel my shriveled lips back, every tooth a spear, protruding from beyond the black cave of my mouth.
I can hear the others already, my family, close enough that they may as well be blood: We can’t hurt her. She might be useful. She’s done nothing to us.
They may be family, but they are soft. What’s one more human? Plus, she knows what Silas did tonight — she knows what we are. If the police connect her to the dead man — and they likely will — she’ll tell them a fantastical story of monsters and blood. One loony human is just another admission to the psych ward, but what if Mikael left other witnesses? Two or three people with similar stories might be mass hysteria, but humans love conspiracies almost as much as they love to hurt each other. We do not need another witch hunt, especially not one directed at our kind.
My eyes graze the wooden rosary draped over the post of the bed. Like the mirrors, the rosary is a reminder — mistakes cannot be tolerated. The smallest of errors can have the most dire of consequences.
The woman’s feet thud against the stairs. Silas — he’s giving her a room. The room beside mine. He should know better, but perhaps it is by design; perhaps he knows what must be done but also knows he cannot do it himself.
