Mrs. Dracula: Vampire Anthology

by Logan Keys

  I hesitate, wondering if I want to hold onto the idea of ‘goddess’. Or do I want to be something lesser? To walk among these people with no pedestal. I am not made of ivory now. Not carved out of stone and created to last.

  My chest hurts. There is a heaviness within it that I have not felt in some time. The burden of a human heart. Not the immortal apathy of a goddess. I place my hand over my body, where my heart resides within me, and I imagine I feel it pumping long-stale fluids throughout my limbs.

  That is when a tall man, strong built and carrying a self-importance that is thick like endless earthquakes across his skin, approaches me. He is a stallion, kept locked away and unable to race about fields with abandon. I can see that he is not a stranger here, however, the other villagers give him berth and some even wear expressions of unease.

  When we are inches apart, I feel it. There is no heartbeat within his chest. He moves soundlessly, because he is soundless. Our eyes meet and there is a familiarity there that would chill my blood, if my blood was still warm within me. I would know that gaze anywhere. I would know the feel of him anywhere. It matters not what guise he wears. I will always know him.

  Vlad.

  “What are you doing here?” I hiss out in a voice so slow that only he will be able to hear me. I use a language the Ugandans won’t understand.

  “I could ask you the same thing, my goddess.” Even though he carries the accent of the country we are stood in, I can hear his real voice. It is like thick, amber honey. Sweet and rich and dripping into my ears. It causes a heat to build inside me, low and teasing.

  “Over fifty years, Vlad. Why now?” I am being a fool, for allowing waves of the wonder of our past together threaten to overwhelm me.

  “You know I have always loved you. Only you.” He lifts his right hand with only his index finger extended. He traces down the middle of my face, from temple to chin. He continues the movement, past the curve of my neck. He pulls away, just as my eyes are closing and I am ready to beg for more.

  “Leave, Vlad.” I look around at the faces of the villagers. Confusion has settled over the crowd. The children are clinging to their mothers, wondering what is happening. The fathers are standing stoically. Bitalo’s brow is furrowed, but he is also the only one who has not moved yards away from us. I see Dembe with her stomach, the mother growing the next generation of this exquisite world.

  There is no stench of hatred and decay here.

  A small boy has moved away from his mother; he still holds her hand, but he is curious enough to not cling to her fully now. He is different than the other children and it takes me a moment to discern why.

  It is the piercing blue eyes within his lovely dark face. He is a wonder. I want to protect him. I cannot be a mother in truth, but I can be a mother to this land.

  “I wish to stay here, Vlad. I wish to make a life here.”

  “I have followed your every step, love. I have always been in your shadows. I will not leave, not now that I have made myself known to you once more.” He leans forward, and there is power roiling off his body. Self-confidence oozes out of his pores with a magnetic attraction that calls to my polar opposite side. It makes me forget what I wanted when I moved here. It makes me forget my desire to start anew.

  It makes me forget the way the food has tasted here and how it has nourished me; it makes me forget how the water has not disgusted me; it makes me forget how my heart has fluttered like a wounded bird within my chest for the first time in so very long.

  “It’s time to kill, my goddess,” Vlad is close enough to breathe the command into my ear. I writhe at the warmth and the compulsion. I tighten at the promise of his lips against my body.

  In our long separation, I have forgotten his hold on me. I have forgotten the power he wields.

  I have let the feeling of his compulsion fade into haunting, distant memory.

  “No, Vlad,” I whisper-scream, feeling the tug at my brain, the impulses rushing to my limbs, the saliva filling my mouth, once again pushing through my lips. I am so hungry; the nourishing food Dembe gave me no longer satisfaction in my stomach, but sourness that wants to be rejected.

  He moves away from me, in that flash of black-cloaked quickness that I remember like it was yesterday even though I know he wears traditional Ugandan garb and that it was not, in fact, yesterday, but nearly a lifetime ago now.

  “Run!” I scream. “Run!” And, now, the villagers do understand me. I find the boy with blue eyes. I scream the word again at him. I scream at him to run. His mother is pulling him away from me and I have no choice but to follow them. I can feel Vlad in my mind. The same way he gave me so much joy in those first few months together, is the same way he is giving me so much horror now.

  I know that now.

  So much compulsion.

  Compulsion to love him.

  Images shriek into my brain like a battered harpy. Tomas had found me after I’d fled my first husband. Tomas had wanted me. But Vlad had wanted me more. Why am I remembering this now? Why!

  Vlad is killing now, slashing his long, sharp nails across throats. Sinking his teeth into the breasts of exposed women. Pulling small children by their hair to raise them upwards to rest at eating height.

  I follow the mother and son into one of the small homes. I follow them into the dimness, because that’s what he wills of me. I am trapped beneath a man again, who is thrusting his power into me, and there is no sweet, releasing weapon here to save me. No fire. No poker. No place can I run.

  Falling upon the mother first, I sink my teeth into her neck whilst I worry at her thighs with my hands, nails now lengthened into sharp claws. In moments, blood pours out from so many wounds. The boy is not screaming. He is not trying to escape his home. I must go to him next. Take his life within my grip and squeeze him until his small, child bones shatter.

  “Please, run,” I say to the boy as I approach, blood dripping from my teeth and fingers. “Please, run.”

  He is frozen though, his back against the wall, his eyes flitting to his mother’s prone form. He will not run. I know that. I will kill him also.

  A bellow sounds behind me, coming from the entrance to the building. I whirl away from the boy instinctively, leaving his blue gaze to pierce at my back. A man has entered, fierce and strange, with midnight hair floating about his head like it is carried upon some unfelt wind. His eyes are the same blazing ocean blue as the boy’s; yet they also flash red like fire. He wields a sword carved with runes. I do not recognize the symbols, but I can feel Vlad’s recognition. He is still connected to me through compulsion, still in that state of dual-sight as he influences my mind and actions.

  Vlad’s power begins to fade from me quickly. In our last connected moments, I can feel his fear and see him running past the carnage he has made of the village. He is abandoning me. Again.

  I sink to my knees, blood tears freefalling down my face.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” I cover my eyes and continue to murmur over and over again that I am sorry.

  When the blade comes to rest upon my neck, I keep my face covered. I am still apologizing. It isn’t only for the life I have just taken, but for all of the lives. I am sorry for my part, as unwilling as it has been, in the butchery of this world with its open hearts and healing hands. I am sorry for all the lives. All the lives.

  Every one of them.

  Innocents and guilty parties alike.

  “Vampyre.” The man breathes out. He speaks other words then and this language defies my understanding. That is something that has never happened before and it causes me to drop my hands and truly look at the sword-bearing stranger. With his words comes a tingling, the anti-euphoria of the change. I am not willing it this time though, and it is not like the food from Dembe which seemed to fill my body with life. The man is forcing it upon me. The guise of Uganda sloughs off my form like melting wax on a scorching day. I feel the flood of my old self pushing outwards and inwards, until I am a warped, backwards thing.


  And then, when the pain of the change is more than I have ever experienced in all of my long life, it stops. I am left panting and heaving on the ground. I look about me with wild eyes. The boy is hovering above his mother, trying desperately to slow the blood that is pouring from the wounds I have inflicted. I wish so very much to take back what I have done. What I have been made to do.

  So many lives I have taken, yet this one carries a weight I cannot bear. It carries the weight of my humanity with it, threaded through every fresh trickle of blood from the mother’s body. I look at my hands, at the milk-paleness of them… and all of the blood. So much blood. I pull my hair forwards from where it has all come to rest against my back. It is long and the color of wheat in summer. This is not the hair of my second life, but the hair of my first. I know that now.

  “What have you done,” I say, looking once again at the man, who is still holding the blade to my neck.

  “I have shown your truth,” he responds, in a voice that is brusque and unfeeling.

  “Am I cured?” Is there a cure for what I have become? Is there a cure for a person’s own awful choices?

  “There is only one cure.” The man lifts the sword, and the absence of it feels like yet another rebirth.

  I have only a brief time to reconcile the soft wind and swooshing sound as the falling of that sword. As the end of me.

  The end of a goddess.

  ~

  [Recording cont’d]

  “There was pain in her eyes. Intense, almost heart-crushing. She’d warned us to run. She’d warned me to run, even as she’d left my mother’s damaged body in her wake.

  I remember her saying ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry’. Over and over again, like the words were her last acts on this Earth. So much sorrow, so much history of blood and violence within her voice. I was reminded of a story Bitalo used to tell the village children, of a man nearly past redemption who found a final way to expunge the malicious choices of his life at the moment of his dying. The angel that saved me, the man with the eyes like my own, saved her in a way.

  He ended her torture.

  Others will say I am wrong, but I believe she came to us without evil in her heart. I believe she was trying to be different. My mother said we can all choose to be new. Every day, it is a beginning. Our village chief did not think in this way, but my mother did. I try to remember her compassion, as she watched the woman lie sleeping and damaged. I remember how she told me that our bodies may stay constant, but our spirit is not.

  And so she was— a spirit desperate for newness. I do not hold her accountable for what happened to my village. Though many think I should.

  I believe it was him. The one that is whispered about and still hunted to this day.

  On him, I focus my rage and revenge.

  We found Sanyu’s body buried in a shallow grave some days after the impersonator had disappeared and the woman’s body had been burned. We all knew Sanyu had not been himself for some time, but how could we know what had happened? How could we know that he was already passed into the other place?

  He spilled first blood in my village. I wonder if he knew she was coming, if he was waiting for her and we were only happenstance. Yes, I think it must be so.

  He is why I followed my saving angel into the Brotherhood, to join my blue-eyed brethren and learn how to ignite the hellhound within my blood. The Brotherhood came to find me in my village, came at the call of my potential, on the day the vampyre slaughtered my world. My mother.

  On him, I focus my rage and revenge.”

  -Kato Nantaba

  Recruited into the Brotherhood at age 16

  Helsing Hellhounds MC— Egypt Chapter

  (Personal account of the Ugandan Vampyre Massacre.

  Recorded and entered into the historical database of the Brotherhood

  May 21st, 1965.)

  WILLA’S WAY

  Aria Michaels

  If I had a soul, the man in the seat across from me would be staring into it.

  After centuries of murdering my way across continents I fear no man, yet I find myself shifting anxiously under his scrutiny. I lean as far back in my seat as I can but there’s nowhere to go and no escaping his intense focus. I cringe as his steely blue eyes, a physical trait found only in the Genetic Elite, roam freely across my body. He smiles at my discomfort, his bottom lip pinned between his teeth. He has no use for the flimsy veil of pretense most men use to disguise their voyeurism.

  Why would he? He is one of them.

  The branding on the side of his neck, a viper swallowing its own tail, is both heavy-handed and absolute. He belongs to Oden, the man behind the iron curtain at Ourovoros. None aboard this shoddy midnight transport will challenge him. Hell, most won’t even look in his direction. He is untouchable and he knows it.

  I do my best to ignore him, but his impure thoughts continue to scrape across my skin. When I can stand the intrusion no longer, I lock eyes with him in a silent rebellion and pull the jeweled comb from atop my head. The elaborate twist I’d spent nearly an hour perfecting falls unceremoniously. My hair cascades around me in a red curtain, revoking a small portion of my flesh from his predatory gaze.

  It’s a small victory, but it’s all I can afford. There are far too many witnesses.

  I’d take so much more from him if I could. It would be easy, too. My small stature and delicate features make me look young and vulnerable. I am anything but. He’ll follow me, of course. Humans are nothing if not predictable, especially the dark ones.

  In the city, people tend to gather like moths to the smallest bit of light. I’ll leave the relative safety their company provides, in search of some fabricated destination, but end up wandering the unfamiliar streets looking frightened and lost. He’ll press on at my back, his footsteps fueled by arrogance and adrenaline. I’ll wrap my arms around my chest and whimper meekly as my heels click against the hard path.

  I’ll be the perfect victim, enticing the predator that lurks beneath his polished surface. When he’s sure he has the upper hand, I’ll slow my pace enough for him to close the distance. He’ll move in for the kill just as I disappear down an abandoned alleyway.

  The moment the shadows swallow him, his fate will be sealed. He’ll try to fight back, they always do, but his struggles will be for naught. Despite his enhancements, he’s still just a man. I’m faster, stronger, and desperate to feed. I am dangerous.

  He’ll cry out and slash at me as my teeth sink into his flesh. He’ll beg for mercy, but none will hear his pleas. I will rip out his throat and drink my fill as he slowly drowns in his own fluids. I won’t drain him, though. If even a drop of my life essence were to enter his bloodstream as we fought, he’d turn.

  That would be disastrous. The last thing I need right now is for that scum to be bound to me. I can barely feed myself, let alone take responsibility for a monster with even greater power than he already has.

  No. Instead, I’ll drink until his heart slows and release him an inch from death. Then, I’ll seal his wounds and stand over him, smiling as I watch the evil leave his eyes. I’d be doing this broken world a favor, ridding it of yet another sadistic creature.

  I consider the fantasy for just a moment longer before deciding that his death is not worth my own. I can’t afford to waste energy on such a fruitless endeavor. I can’t feed from him. Like most of the world’s populace, this man’s body has been tainted by OUROVOROS’s scientific pandering. Elite blood is little more than poison and programming. I can smell the lies pumping through his veins and it makes my stomach turn.

  I shrug away my murderous thoughts in favor of patience and self-preservation. I will feed tonight, I must, but this depraved asshole is not on the menu. I will drink from the last well of pure blood the city has to offer.

  Virtue, a nightclub nestled in the ghettos outside of Eden City, is rumored to be a haven for the few genetically unmodified citizens who remain. The Genetic Elite call these people Deficients. They are imperfect, lacking
, diseased. Ourovoros has convinced the world that such deviations are at the root of all evil. They have made it their mission to eliminate these perceived flaws at all cost.

  To that end, when a Deficient citizen comes of age, they are given two choices; enslavement or exile.

  Those who desire safety within the city’s massive walls must submit to Ourovoros’s Secondary Citizenship Protocol. These individuals are immediately sterilized, embedded with a tracking device, and assigned to a ghetto. Here, they will live out the remainder of their days in virtual squalor as property of the Elite.

  The rest are banished and quickly forgotten.

  Once a year, the gates of Eden City open and Deficients who value freedom over protection are ejected from the city. They are given one day’s rations and the clothes on their backs, then sent out into the uncharted toxic wasteland that exists beyond the city. When the gates close behind them, the city erupts in celebration as Oden and his Ourovoros forces inch ever closer to winning the war against free will.

  I disagree with both their politics and their methods, and not just because I’m starving.

  I’ve been around for thousands of years. I’ve watched from the shadows as mankind has slowly tried to destroy itself. A long time ago, when my heart beat its last as a mortal, war was the plaything of the godly. Men in white robes and gold crowns paraded about with their books and beads, promising salvation in exchange for the blood of nonbelievers. As time dragged on, the need for divinity was replaced by a thirst for global conquest.

  Man built ships and vessels and violated the seas. They raped and pillaged and burned their way across uncharted lands, all in the name of imperialism. When their cities outgrew their provisions, industry and innovation edged in. Eventually, when humans were no longer satisfied with their noisy machines and mass-produced uniqueness, they looked to science to feed their ceaseless hunger for advancement.

  For a time, the world had hope. A vast worldwide network bridged the gap between distant nations. Computers simplified man’s existence and increased productivity. Medicine cured the sick and mobilized the infirm. Early genetic engineering fed the hungry. Artificial energy sources powered the world, finally bringing light to the darkest parts of the globe. There was finally a measure of peace.