by D. N. Hoxa
But I couldn’t see. I just felt.
I went down with the vampire still under me. My hands searched, and I felt the burn when I touched the silver rod. I didn’t care. I grabbed it and I pushed it down, and down, and down again until the body under me stopped moving.
The noise in my head began to fade. My vision became clearer. I was having some sort of a breakdown. It was the only explanation I could come up with. I no longer felt in control of my body. Like, when all I wanted to do was run for the door, my legs turned to the side, and my body jumped inside the hole that the woman had made.
Run, I shouted in my own head. You’re going to die! Run!
And my body ran, but it ran towards the three vampires. I’d never seen something like that. They were mad. The one with the torn cheek was lying there, blood all over him, while the others were fighting each other. For what?
Their eyes were silver, and their teeth long and sharp. They were bloody, too, and that’s when I realized that they were fighting each other for the blood of the third.
My body continued to move like it knew what to do by memory. My hands reached out for the hair of the vampire with his back turned, and just like that, I pulled him. The back of his neck met the silver rod that my other hand held.
It slid in so easily, I wanted to be sick. But my body continued to move like I was in a dream. Maybe that was it. Maybe this was all some dream I was having before I died. But it felt so very real. The flesh of the only standing vampire, the way my fists connected with his face, the way his nose broke…and then the way the silver slid through his neck, too. So easily.
Then, everything went quiet. My legs gave up on me, and I fell on a body. My head was telling me that I didn’t have too much time. I had to go get the knife and start cutting the heads off them. But I couldn’t move. I felt like I wasn’t myself. The way I’d moved, the way I’d lost control…all of it was too much and I couldn’t even begin to think about what it was.
Time must’ve passed, though I don’t know how long, before I heard movement. Maybe the woman had woken up. Maybe she had healed and was going to come for me, drink my blood to get her strength back, and then kill me.
“Goddamn it!” someone said, but it wasn’t the woman. “Hammer?!”
It was Dublin.
I wanted to speak, to say something, to tell him where I was. Maybe he knew. He smelled me the first time, didn’t he?
“What the hell happened?” He was in front of me in a second, pulling me by my arms.
“I killed them,” I said. “I tried to kill them.”
“I saw,” he whispered, and he kneeled down by the body I had been lying on just second ago. I saw that he had a knife on his hand, a much better one than the kitchen knife I used. He cut through the remaining pieces of the vampire’s throat, and then moved on to the next two.
He was done amazingly fast.
“They were…they were coming after you…”
“I know that, Hammer,” he said, almost with pity.
“Don’t call me that!” I hissed. I hated to be called someone I wasn’t. Or maybe I had been this Hammer. The way I’d lost control of my body that night, the way I’d fought like I knew how, made me want to think about who Hammer had been, what he had done, and why everybody was so fucking sure that I was him.
“We need to leave, right now,” he said, and disappeared.
I didn’t dare look at the decapitated bodies around me, so I followed.
The shelves filled with alcohol mocked me, and I laughed.
“I’m taking everything,” I said, because I’d been so excited when I first heard that bottle breaking.
“There’s no time, Matias,” Dublin warned. He was already at the door, looking up the stairs, straining his ears.
“I don’t care if there’s time, Dublin.” After all, it had been him who had put me in that mess. Not really, but I needed someone to blame. “I need alcohol.”
“There’ll be plenty of it where we’re going,” he said.
“We?” I asked. Did he mean me and him? Was he going to take me with him?
“Yes, Matias. Me and you. I’ll take you to a safe place,” he said.
I forgot about the bottles and followed him. When we were out in the dead streets, we ran. I didn’t see which way, and I didn’t care. I just followed.
XIII
Dublin never spoke to me. Not one word. It took two nights to get to where he was taking us. On the first, we found shelter just minutes before sunrise. I had only a few seconds to speak before unconsciousness took me.
“I wanted to kill them for…you. To protect you. I can’t make it to Yukon, Dublin. I need… I need…” I wanted to say that I needed him, but I couldn’t.
Papa had taught me when I was a kid that you don’t need anything from anyone, and nothing is worth begging for. He’d hurt me even more when I’d asked him to stop, so that was a lesson well learned.
But was life worth begging for? I didn’t know. And unconsciousness took me soon after the last words left my mouth. Dublin didn’t reply the next night. And when he took us under a short, wide building, and made me jump almost ten feet to a landing I couldn’t see because there were no stairs, as soon as I sat down, I was gone.
Unconsciousness dropped me with force the next night. I woke up startled, as if I’d had a bad dream. I hadn’t. I never realized how many dreams I had before, or how much I enjoyed them. I never realized I’d liked them before they were gone. Took them for granted, just like everything else.
I was ready to start running as soon as I stood, the same thing we’d been doing for two nights in a row. But when I looked around, Dublin was not there. The room I was in had no windows. Just a table and some black bags against the walls. The place was small and the ceiling low.
Guessing was easy. So many things around me, things I’d never seen before, and I guessed. I could guess. It didn’t surprise me anymore.
Even when I’d first seen the huge building and the metal carriages and the weird, funny figures, I hadn’t been too surprised. I had just accepted them without freaking out even a little bit. It was like my brain knew them somehow, and it didn’t let me panic.
To lose control of your own body and to see things that should’ve normally made you cry and run, to speak a language so fluently—and to think in it with words you never even knew in your own mother tongue—had to be the weirdest thing the world had seen.
A door opened to my right, one I hadn’t even noticed, and Dublin walked in with a bottle in hand. A plastic one, and inside it was… blood.
I smelled it and felt my teeth grow big and sharp. He threw it to me, and I caught it midair before I drank. I drank it all in one gulp. The blood was cold but satisfying. My senses calmed immediately. If I could just have more…
“That’ll do until you learn how to feed properly,” Dublin spoke for the first time in two days.
“Are you going to teach me?”
“No, not me. A friend.”
I froze for a second. “Why can’t you see that whoever sees me tries to kill me? Just help me learn some things, like feeding and finding shelter and fighting, and you won't ever have to see me again.”
I didn’t want to sound like I was begging, but the pleading tone in my voice couldn’t be helped.
“That is what you’re going to learn, but not from me. A friend who will be here in a night or two,” he insisted. The way he looked at me didn’t make anything better.
“Who the hell are you? Do you still think I’m Hammer? Is that why you’re helping me?”
“Matias, you are Hammer.”
“No!” I shouted.
I went to the nearest wall and hit it only to find that it was stronger than my fist, and my knuckles broke. They healed soon, but the seconds before they did were hell. “Don’t you dare tell me I’m someone else. I am Matias Del Bosque!”
“Okay…”
“First this nightmare I wake up in, and then another I live through,” I
continued as I thought of Ray, “and I keep running, and running, and no matter where I go, there’s no running away from bad luck! You are the only one who can help me, and you won't, but you know what? If you’re helping me because you think I’m someone else, then don’t, okay?” My voice shook. “I am Matias, and it doesn’t matter that I killed five vampires because I wanted your help—I won’t take it if you can't accept that.”
I should’ve been breathless by that time, but…well, I guess I was enjoying the perks of being a vampire.
“Okay, Matias. Okay,” Dublin said with his hands in front of him, like he was willing me to calm down. “You are Matias, and I’ll help you because you’re Matias. You’re not Hammer.”
I nodded. I feared the relief would show on my face so I avoided his eyes.
“You said five vampires,” Dublin said.
I squeezed my eyes shut. “There was another I killed a few nights ago. His name was Jordy. He thought I was Hammer, too.”
“He saw your face?” he asked, panicked all of a sudden. I nodded. “Are you sure you killed him?”
“I cut his head off. I hid it in a building and his body in another, far away. If heads can’t walk by themselves, then I guess you could say he’s dead.”
Dublin almost sighed. “Keep your mask on at all times, you hear me?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m doing,” I said.
“I need you to stay here, Matias, until my friend comes to find you, okay?”
“Are you kidding me?”
He acted like he hadn’t heard me at all. “Let me show you some things around here before I’m on my way,” he said and disappeared behind the door he’d come through. Fuck.
I followed. “Can’t you just sit down and talk to me like a normal person? Will you at least tell me why there were vampires after you, and who Mohg is?”
At the mentioning of Mohg’s name, he stopped moving.
“Who told you about Mohg?” His voice sounded different all of a sudden.
“Jordy did.” Dublin looked away from me. “So, who is he?”
“He’s someone you don’t want to meet,” Dublin said. “At least not yet.”
“Well, why not? Isn’t he the boss?”
“Yes, he is, and you will meet him when the time comes.” I was going to ask more questions, but he didn’t let me. He continued. “Through here is the poison room,” he said and opened another door, which led to shelves—bigger than the last I’d seen—of alcohol. “Poison is what we call alcohol, and mine is gin and wine, but in here wine is all I have.”
“Wine is fine,” I said, half amazed, half surprised. “So this is your place?”
“One of many,” he said with a nod. “Over here is the bathroom. You could really use a shower.” The opposite door from the poison room led to his bathroom. The place was white, clean, except for a thin sheet of dust, and there was a glass square in one corner, which Dublin opened and then pulled something made of metal, up.
And to my side, there was a mirror. My eyes almost popped out of my skull. I had changed. I’d changed completely!
I went closer to the mirror until the tip of my nose touched the cold glass. It was amazing. My eyes that had once been grey were now brown; a very light brown, and my hair, too. It was brown, and it had been black as the midnight, just like my mother’s.
Dublin just gave me raised brow and continued.
“You pull this up, and on the left, and you have warm water. See?” Water sprayed from the piece of round metal attached to the side of the glass. “And right, for cool water. There’s the toilet, and in that drawer you have a new brush for your teeth, and everything else you need. Just make sure you use the shampoo there.” He pointed at a green bottle.
“That looks good,” I mumbled. I probably smelled bad, but I was used to my smell so I didn’t really notice. What I noticed was the way my hair felt different now that I knew it had changed color. And my eyes, too.
He took us out of the bathroom, and to the third door, right next to the poison room.
“There’s space here to do everything you want to. Practice, read, anything. I have electricity—that’s what powers all technological things,” he had lost me, but I didn’t interrupt, “but make sure you go easy on it. We don’t want to raise questions.”
The room was indeed wide. The ceiling was low there, too, and judging from the concrete pieces everywhere, it looked like he’d broken the walls of at least ten rooms and made a huge one. There were books, neatly organized in one corner, a couple of bottles of red wine in the other. There was a firearm, long and big next to the books, and then knives and swords thrown close to it.
“And this is it,” he said with a nod to himself.
“Will I see you again?” I knew he would be leaving soon.
“Of course you will, Matias. Though if we saw each other in the presence of other vampires, I think it would be better to pretend that we don’t know each other. Can you do that?”
He was talking to me like I was a little child. I still nodded.
“What will it be like? After everything. After I learn everything, is there more to this than just running?”
So far, all I’d had to do was run from one place to another. I had to believe there was more out there than just that.
“Yes, there is,” he said. “I need you to promise me two things. First is that you never make promises, not ever, unless your life depends on it. And second, keep the mask on at all times if you can, no matter what.”
“If I could—”
“Promise me, Matias. Promise me. No promises unless your life depends on it, and no removing the mask unless it’s taken by someone else, and you can’t help it.”
He seemed desperate.
“In that case, I won’t promise you anything, but I will do my best.”
Dublin smiled.
XIV
I didn’t have to wait long for Dublin’s friend to arrive. I was inside the Giant Room (that was what I was calling it now, for lack of a better term), reading one of the books piled on the floor about a guy named Finnikin, right after I’d bathed and scrubbed my skin almost raw. I read and appreciated the nice smell of the shampoo when I heard movement above me. I wasn’t used to hearing anything down there—Dublin told me nobody knew of that place. Except the friend.
I waited in the room I spent the days in, which was about twelve feet from the outside door. And when it opened, I couldn’t believe my eyes.
“You have to be joking,” I mumbled to myself. It was her. The Bugz girl.
“Hello there, Matias,” she said with ease, though it seemed like she was having trouble looking at me. I still had my mask on.
“You’re Dublin’s friend?” I asked. It was kind of hard to think that a man like Dublin would even say a word to someone like her. He seemed so much more reserved than her.
“Not exactly. But I am yours,” she said. She looked uncomfortable. I could tell by the way she played with her hands, like she didn’t know what to do with them. “Why didn’t you tell me your name, Matias? When we first met,” she asked.
“I owe you nothing,” I replied. I didn’t know her enough to not like her, but the fact that she was stronger than me and had showed me just how much didn’t sit well with me.
“But I owe you,” she whispered. She wouldn’t meet my eyes, so I went to her and made her face me.
“I am not Hammer, okay? Please tell me that you don’t think that.” This was beginning to worry me.
“Take off your mask,” she said instead.
“No.” I stepped back.
“Take it off,” she repeated. “Please.” She didn’t seem like the person to say please often. “Just for a second.”
She almost sounded like she was out of breath. She sounded desperate. I didn’t do well with people around me showing emotions like that. Deep emotions. They seemed to connect with a part of me that cared too much, and I didn’t like that. But she had won. I took off the damn mask.
&nbs
p; She was frozen when my eyes met hers again. Not even a hair moved on her body. She looked like a statue like that—no heartbeat, no breathing, no movement.
“God, how I’ve missed you,” she breathed, and the next second, her arms wrapped tightly around me. I pushed her back immediately and put my mask back on.
“I am not Hammer!”
“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay, fine. Sorry about that, Matias. I get it, it’s normal for you to react that way. But we’re going to find out where your memories are, you hear me? We’re going to find out what the hell happened down there that made you forget.”
She was trying to calm me, but that only made me feel worse.
So I turned around and ran to the poison room and locked myself in like a little kid. With a bottle in hand, I sat down against the door.
There was no talking to these people. I closed my eyes and drank, and begged for the sun to rise faster. I don’t know why it felt like it did. Why the fact that they thought I was someone else hurt. Maybe because there were things I refused to think about—things like it was the seventeenth century just yesterday, and then I woke up and it was the twentieth. I didn’t dare think about what had happened in between. Or maybe because that night with those vampires, I’d turned into someone else. My body had failed to obey me completely and had acted as if it knew moves I’d never seen before, all by memory. And that couldn’t be normal.
So, had I really been a guy named Hammer for three hundred years? Was Dublin right? And Bugz? Had I somehow forgotten?
I refused to believe it. I was Matias, my mother’s son. And no matter what they thought, that was what I was going to remain.
“Matias, I’m sorry,” the voice behind the door said. “I promise I won’t do it again, okay? It’s just that…”
Bugz stopped speaking. I felt her slide against the door on the other side.
“What was he like?” I asked before I realized I’d spoken. I don’t know what pushed me to wonder that, but Bugz started to laugh, and I listened.
“Stupid,” she said, but her laugh was filled with affection. “Courageous, funny when he wanted to be. He was smart. Everybody feared him.”
