Dreams for the Dead

by Heather Crews

  After a couple blood binges, the rage lessened and he understood the wisdom of spending time apart. He couldn’t be with her if he acted like a child whenever something made him unhappy. He couldn’t properly love her if he didn’t accept himself, flawed past and all, the way she did.

  Even after the rage faded, the separation was harder to endure than he’d anticipated. He’d always been lonely in some vague, unhappy way, but now his loneliness made him restless, like there was an itch he could never scratch. He also felt indescribably sad. He had this persistent ache in his chest being away from her. He drove himself mad with longing for the feel and smell of her skin. He hadn’t realized how much he’d come to rely on her presence, her availability to him. She’d been his undoing.

  When girls approached him in bars he thought about fucking them—in the bathroom, in the alley, in his car. But even these idle thoughts filled him with deep revulsion and he began telling them to get lost more often than he bothered to take them out back to sip from their necks. He moped in the shadows, craving their blood anyway and wishing he could drown himself in alcohol. Out of all the faces swimming before him, he could see only one.

  He got a portable record player and scoured record stores to replace his favorites of the ones he’d lost. For hours he mired himself in the sounds of Dead Moon and Hüsker Dü, lounging in the hotel room with the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, contemplating drinking the blood of housekeepers whenever he heard their cart out in the hall. Or the night clerk, or sleepy guests returning late to their rooms.

  Several times he did drink from the hotel population, discreetly. But often he lay there on the still-made bed, consumed with anxiety. He needed to see her. He needed her.

  Angrily, he would often force himself to stare at his reflection in the mirror in the dark. He imagined punching the silvery glass until it splintered, punching until it shattered in a deafening shower around him. He imagined rolling naked in the slivers until they were embedded in every inch of his skin. The pain would lessen his anger and make his self-loathing easier to bear.

  Instead, his hands gripped the countertop until he heard it start to crack, and then he stepped away before he caused more damage.

  Sometimes he wondered, in moments of extreme self-pity, if he’d ever be good enough for Dawn. It made him sick to think of the abysmal way he’d treated her. Even if he devoted the rest of his life to charitable pursuits and never killed another person, his sordid past was inescapable, a black cloud hanging over him.

  If he couldn’t escape it and couldn’t erase it, he finally reasoned there was nothing to do but live with it, and in doing so create a new life—a better life. One that wouldn’t make him ashamed or desperate for death.

  Not killing people was a good start, he thought, even if he did need to drink their blood. But he’d forgotten how to be good. It had been so long. It was probably futile to try to become so. Fucking pointless, like everything else.

  Then he remembered it wasn’t just for himself he needed to change—it was for Dawn. And he would do anything for her, the least of which was try to be a decent person. A decent vampire, if there was such a thing.

  I don’t kill anymore. I’ve never raped. But the absence of such depravity didn’t make him worthy. I have to be good for her. I have to be good to her.

  He managed to persuade himself into a job at a shitty motel doing maintenance on the night shift. They kept a room for him, new and yet familiar: dingy yellow light, sunken bed, the occasional roach, invasion of outside noises. The job paid cash under the table, which was necessary, since he didn’t even know his own social security number. Surely he had one, but some day, if he lived long enough, it would be useless to him anyway. It was easier to exist on the fringes, he imagined, than it would be to bother changing identities once he’d outlasted a lifetime.

  So he worked. He didn’t know how to fix individual A/C units or mini fridges, but he figured it out somehow, after denting the walls with one or two tools first. In his downtime he’d stand on the sidewalk outside the motel, smoking and watching traffic rush past on Boulder Highway. He drank blood. He slept. He faded under the lights and melted into the blur of night.

  Though he could have easily found them—and they him—Tristan hadn’t seen Augusta or Fallon since the night of the fire. He worked all night and slept all day. He didn’t have time to hunt them down. They’d turn up eventually, he expected, together or separately. In their absence, nobody was around to remind him of the things he’d done, though. Tristan had killed them all.

  They came to him in dreams—Loftus, Branek, and Jared—to hold him accountable for what he’d done. He would wake in the dimmed glow of his room in the afternoon, A/C rattling on high, and push his face into the flat pillow to shout until the tears stopped coming. He fucking missed them, his family. He hadn’t meant to kill them. He’d never set out to do that. Nobody can touch us. He’d ended them with barely a second thought. And now he regretted the hell out of it.

  “I’m sorry,” he growled, voice muffled in the pillow. “I had to do it. I had to. You fucked with me. You had to die.” He exhaled a long, weary sigh and whispered, “We were all fucked anyway.”

  They’d been too full of poison to live.

  That was what he told himself whenever the pain of guilt became too great. He was poisonous too, only there was no one left to judge him.

  He wouldn’t much care, if only Dawn would forgive him. If only she’d be there to love him, and let him love her. Let him make her happy.

  Six months, he thought. The words were like a prison sentence. But he tried to be optimistic for perhaps the first time in his life. Six months wasn’t so long when he had nothing but forever.

  ~

  It was weeks of adjusting to life alone as a vampire, months of life without Tristan. There were nights, lonely and bleak, spent weeping into her pillow, and when she slept there were dreams of severed hands and bad-angel boys. She dreamed of blood and the copper tang of it filling her mouth.

  She dreamed of Tristan, and thought constantly of him whenever she was awake.

  Every night she stalked alone beneath the moon and streetlights looking for prey, but often she found none, or was too afraid to sink her teeth into a stranger’s neck. Sometimes she was so skittish, starting at every ordinary sound—the wind moving tree limbs, a car door slamming, a neighborhood cat bursting from the bushes. She felt exposed whenever a car passed by, headlights slipping over her. When the headlights faded, she felt much more at ease. Darkness was her shelter now.

  Too often she returned home in the quietest hours of night, starving, and hated herself for not having satisfied her craving.

  Her longing for Tristan was a shadow clinging to her every action. It stemmed piercingly from her core and tore her grand notions of self-worth asunder. Unceasing whispered accusations of murderer, murderer haunted her thoughts infernally, and she did not know how to reconcile rationality with desire. Everything she had told him was true, and yet she didn’t deal easily with his absence.

  She knew letting him go was the best thing she could have done, for both of them. It felt like the worst. Six months was not long enough, but it was forever.

  “Get out of the apartment,” Leila would say, angry and hurt. “Get of bed, at least. Don’t you have things to do?” Dawn would often respond with a grunt, if she responded at all. “Fine!” Leila would shout, and whirl out of the room. The next day she would try again.

  Weeks passed where Dawn didn’t leave her room if she could help it. She only stalked the streets at night, taking easy prey if she could find it. But by day she slept and cried and stared into space, and performed only the most essential functions. Nothing she told herself made her believe she didn’t need him.

  And then one day she woke and noticed the morning sunlight filtering softly through the sheer purple curtains of her bedroom window. It had been a long time since she’d woken so early. She stared at the gauzy curtains until her eyelids stopped dr
ooping like dew-heavy petals. Awake, she stayed in bed a few languid moments, listening to her fingers whisk across the crispness of her yellow sheets, the occasional sounds of tires on the pavement outside the window.

  For the first time she realized how foolish she had been acting. If she continued in this melancholy stasis, her life would collapse. They were going to meet again in five months anyway. So she got up, showered, and dressed. She made coffee out of habit, liking the way the rich smell filled the apartment. She was going to look for work. Vampires had rent and expenses. Vampires had to have a job like everyone else.

  “I’m seeking employment,” she announced grandly when Leila woke up.

  Leila rubbed her eyes and squinted sleepily at Dawn. “What? Okay. Finally. Did you make coffee?”

  “Is the sky blue?”

  “I don’t know. Is it even morning?”

  The sky was blue that day, a pure, rich blue, arcing cloudless over the mountains. But the haze of air hovering over the Strip was brown, the blue tinged with smog and dust.

  Pollution-blue, Dawn thought as she stepped out into the sorely brilliant morning.

  It was hard feigning optimism when she really felt miserable. She drove around thinking of places to apply. A coffee shop. The library. A tailor’s, because she sort of knew how to sew. The rock shop, where she bought all her crystals. The daytime hours of these places didn’t appeal. A fucking hotel was a distinct possibility. She shuddered. God, no.

  In the end there wasn’t anything she wanted more than her old job, so she went to Endpapers. The hours suited her as a vampire, and she loved books, and it was familiar. She hoped she hadn’t waited too long to return.

  Roy sat at her old spot behind the register. At the sound of the bells on the door, he hastily paused his laptop and looked up. “Hey!” he said, surprised.

  “W-what’s that you’re watching?” she asked, taking a hesitant step toward him.

  “Strange Days,” he said, a hint of suspicion in his voice. “An underrated classic.”

  “Oh.” Dawn paused awkwardly and then burst out, “Please tell me I can have my job back! Please, Roy, I need it. I’m so sorry. My life’s been so fucked up— You have no idea—”

  “Um … you don’t have to beg,” he interrupted quietly, embarrassed by her display of emotion. “I haven’t hired anyone. I thought I could save money by doing it myself. Which I did. But it’s boring, and I don’t have as much time to watch movies.”

  “Thank you,” Dawn gushed. “I really am sorry. I didn’t mean to barge in here like this.”

  “Stop apologizing. I’m not giving you overtime to make up for the days you lost. Just come in tonight and work your regular hours, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  She fell into something close to her old rhythm, only now she slept late and wandered the streets after wandering the towering aisles at work. Sometimes she drank blood, but not every day. It wasn’t always convenient, though she always craved it with her parched mouth, her burning gut, her aching fangs. Her hands trembled if she went too long without it.

  On weekends she began to go out with Leila. That was a convenient way to get blood, Dawn quickly discovered. Leila had a lot of friends at school and they liked to get together at bars. Under cover of darkened artificial lights and the upbeat sounds of a local band, Dawn would flirt and tease and draw college boys away from their friends. She would bite them between parked cars or behind the stairs or in the women’s bathroom.

  Sometimes Leila would catch her eye as she returned and Dawn, both disgusted and sated by boozy blood, would feel ashamed. But Leila never said anything. Leila didn’t understand, not fully, but she tried not to judge.

  Several weeks passed, and Leila finished her semester with plenty of work to show for it. No one would guess she’d missed more than a week of classes, captive of a vampire who harbored damaging delusions of romance. She’d seemed to recover so quickly from her time with Jared. By immersing herself in art projects for school, she could effectively work through the things she’d experienced with him. That was how she’d explained it to Dawn, anyway, and Dawn saw no evidence to the contrary. Leila became, again, the same girl she’d always been.

  “Will you come out with me tonight?” she asked Dawn one day. “There’s a show of everyone’s final work, and we’re all getting drinks after.”

  Leila worked her way around the gallery that night, sharing stories and laughing. She knew everyone. Dawn watched from a corner, ill at ease among the happy chatter and bright lights. Oddly, they frightened her. They repelled her faintly.

  All the pictures were in thin black frames against the clean white gallery walls. At a passing glance, they looked identical. Dawn began to glide past them, glancing at some and ignoring others. There were shots of people taken in their beds from unflattering angles. Shots of people lounging on couches, their zoned out faces cast in a television’s glow. Shots of empty chairs. Shoulder blades. Blurry shots of light shapes made through windows.

  One picture was Dawn sitting in a booth at the Egg House, her body and face draped in striking shadows, her skin the yellowish color of a fading bruise. Her eyes, burned to lightless orbs, stared off somewhere past the camera. She looked bored and lost and lonely, and a little alien. The picture looked exactly how she felt, and she stared at it a long time.

  “What do you think?” Leila asked, coming to stand beside her.

  “It’s perfect,” Dawn said.

  “You …” Leila stepped closer and lowered her voice. “You’re not going to bite anyone here, are you?”

  Dawn glanced around at Leila’s fellow art students—mostly girls wearing cute dresses and boys who couldn’t be bothered to groom a beard.

  “No,” she said. She stepped back from the picture and gave Leila a smile. “I’m going now.”

  “Do you need my keys? I can get a ride from someone.”

  “Thanks, but I want to walk. I’ll see you later.”

  The December evening was crisp and clean. She unzipped the jacket she wore from habit but didn’t really need. Clouds followed her down the sidewalk.

  In her time as a vampire, the night had opened like a door for her. She could go anywhere now without fear. Anything she wanted was available for the taking if only she would reach out a hand. People her age, tipsy and carefree, hopped down the streets in search of underground nightlife. Unsuspecting figures moved inside the blazing white boxes of corner convenience stores. Burning eyes peered at her from the shadows, sometimes invitingly. Faceless others roamed alongside her, tortured by their own quests for sick seduction.

  But among them all, he was never there.

  Come back, she thought with longing. Don’t be gone.

  She found a diner and slipped inside, squinting her eyes against the needlessly bright lights. She sipped on coffee even though she didn’t need it and stared out the window. It was still dark, but the sky was beginning to lighten. She felt no compulsion to hurry home.

  Sunlight doesn’t hurt me. But I prefer the dark. We all do.

  Daylight represented an escape for her now. Daylight was where most people lived. But she was no longer like most people.

  “I want the sun!” she once shouted at the night. Nothing answered. The moon mocked her with its reflected glow.

  Months slipped by with ease. Each day became less miserable than the last. Dawn carved a routine out of her endless stretch of hours: going to work in the afternoons, trying to find blood afterward, purifying crystals and moving them about her room, altering dresses for Leila in the middle of the night, and reading until the last trace of darkness had vanished from the sky. With the morning bright but the sun still behind the mountains, she slept and slept. On her nights off, it was back to bars or art shows, where she could often pretend to be normal. Mostly.

  She met people. She made friends, though she would never feel as close to any of them as she did to Leila. They could never know the truth about her, and that was fine. Dawn had always liked t
o be alone, but these days she craved solitude. It was as necessary to her now as blood.

  It turned out she didn’t need Tristan after all. He entered her thoughts less frequently than before, and she hardly ever dreamed of him. She was content in her stagnant life. She wasn’t happy, exactly, but that had little to do with him. The recent past haunted her in hellish abstract. Flashes of bloodied faces and unforgiving hands grasping at her kept her awake. Images of the strangers she’d tasted stole her dreams.

  She thought she understood why Tristan rarely slept or dreamed, and why he’d been so cruel. A vampire’s life was emotionally draining. There was energy for dwelling on the past or for pretending guilt was only for soft-hearted idiots, but not for both.

  In March, warmish and windy, he returned. Dawn was walking home from work, a nightly routine now, when she became aware of a difference in the air. A new but familiar scent—the mingling of pine incense, soap-cleansed skin, and oleander—drifted to her on the breeze. She quickened her pace eagerly and then slowed to a stop.

  Her hair stood on end as he walked into view, a lean black shadow. A streetlight blinked out overhead, but in the dark she could see perfectly. Her hair was growing out in crazy curls over her ears and forehead, but he still looked the same.

  There was a moment’s pause when Tristan stopped in front of her, his face white in the gloom, his shadowed eyes betraying a thrilled heart. A moment filled with unvoiced emotion and infinite desire passed between them. She felt deliciously, terrifyingly overwhelmed.

  “You came,” she said when she found her voice.

  “I told you I’d be here,” he reminded her. He reached for her hands. “And I won’t ever leave you again, if you’ll have me.”

  “You know I’ll have you.”

  He smiled, but it was brief. The gleam in his eyes faded and his face turned serious. “I want to apologize. I don’t like the things I said to you, Dawn. I don’t like that I made you feel bad. It was so wrong of me. Will you forgive me?”