“I am wishing to hell right now that we had never met, because no matter how this ends, it does have to end.”
He crumpled against the wall, her declaration hanging in the air like thick, rolling fog. All he heard was the pounding of his heart in his ears drumming: too soon…too soon…too soon.
He desperately searched for the words that would change her mind, wanting to fight for her, not willing to give up.
“Summer, please don’t do this,” he implored. “Not yet.” His heart was full and overflowing with things he wanted to tell her, clinging to a sliver of hope that his words would be enough to bring her rushing into his arms. Finding the strength in his legs, he rose and walked to her. Taking her by the shoulders, he turned her towards him.
“I need you,” he entreated. “In my darkest hours you are in my mind like a beacon of light.”
He glimpsed his existence without her, replete with endless, aimless nights, feeble candles and dusty books.
“Don’t put out the light, Summer,” he urged, shaking his head. “You are still young. There is so much more that we can share.”
“And for how long, Lucien? A week, a month, or less, like the female vampires you have collected and discarded,” she said, her voice dripping with contempt. Lucien’s body recoiled as if he’d been blindsided by a sucker punch.
“The female…” he sputtered. “I don’t even want to know how you found out about them. But this is different - you are different,” he protested.
She rolled her eyes in disbelief.
“I know full fucking well,” he admitted, “that I should spurn involvement with humans, but I wanted you.” He shook her by the shoulders until she looked him in the eye. “I want you still.”
She lowered her gaze, shaking her head slowly from side to side.
How she’d found out about his past he couldn’t guess. None of it mattered now, but still he felt he needed to try and explain.
“Do you know how cold and unfeeling female vamps can be? They’re sometimes more predatory than the males. I don’t want them,” he protested. “I want you!”
Summer broke from his grasp, turning her back on him once more, as if she didn’t care to hear his explanation. Lucien pursued her. She had her say, and he would have his. He stood behind her, wrapping her in his arms, and murmured in her ear.
“For nearly three hundred years I have wandered this earth, drifting from city to city, lover to lover, finally convincing myself that I needed no one, and that no one would ever again need me.” Recalling his spent days, he once again felt the numbing crush of desolation.
“Then I heard your voice coming over the radio, and something inside of me moved. For those few hours every night, I would listen to you, and I felt human once more, connected to something. I wanted to experience the warmth and innocence of a human woman, to hold her mortality in my hands.”
He felt her muscles relax as she softened against him. His heart leapt, encouraged by this one small sign.
“Mortals are born with the knowledge that someday they must die; when something extraordinary happens in their lives, they cherish it even more because time is fleeting.” He laid his cheek atop her head, his breath stirring the filaments of her hair.
“I wanted to be that something extraordinary for you, Summer.”
“Oh, Lucien,” she sighed, turning to him and burying her face in his chest. “What are we going to do?”
She sounded so forlorn, as if stripped of all hope.
It seemed a weighty anchor dragged his heart to the bottomless sea of remorse. In seeking the redemption of his lonely soul, he had only visited his misery on her. His mind reeled, realizing that she was now as broken as he was. It chilled his bones to think of what he’d done, and the bitter taste of self-loathing rose in his mouth like bile.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, his eyes burning with tears he could not cry.
He squeezed her tightly, crushing her to his body. “Believe me, I never meant for it to be this way.”
Summer looked into his eyes, her chin quivering. “It’s my fault too. I wasn’t an innocent bystander. I thought I could handle it, but I just didn’t see it coming.” She covered her face and wept into her hands.
Lucien knelt on one knee in front of her, the truth of her words pressing heavily on his heart and mind. The affair seemed beautiful and true, but it was as cursed as he was.
When he considered the life he might have doomed her to, his body trembled at the horror of it. He imagined her insecurely examining her aging face in the mirror, as she grew older while he never changed. He thought of the children she would never bear, and he withered with the shame of his selfishness.
He couldn’t save his family from the revolutionaries, and he couldn’t save Summer from the torment he had personally delivered to her doorstep. He was as ineffectual now as he had been then. Impotent in body and soul, so filled with disgrace he couldn’t bear to look in her eyes.
“I have no right to ask for more than I’ve already taken,” he said. Lifting her delicate hand to his lips he kissed it, as he did the first time they had met. “Bonsoir, Mademoiselle.”
A suffocating shroud of sorrow descended on Summer as she watched Lucien stumble out the door. The room turned as cold and empty as outer space, and she shivered uncontrollably; not from the chill, but from the earthquake of grief which trembled through her veins and rattled her bones. In the course of a few hours, the affair had ended, but its impact, she knew, would live on. The vampire had changed her life, profoundly and irrevocably, in ways she feared she had yet to discover. Curling inside of her robe, she stared at the moon, hanging high and white in the starless sky, feeling very small and very alone.
Salty tears of anguish flooded her eyes, flowing in remorseful streams over the hills and valleys of her face.
She would never forget him, she knew. Her eyes would never stop searching the darkened streets for a glimpse of him. Her heart would always hold a tender place for him. The beautiful vampire would haunt all the days of her life, and always it would be Lucien… Lucien… forever, Lucien.
Le Louvraie
In the distance, a phone rang. The ringing became louder as she floated back to consciousness. Rubbing her swollen eyes, she answered the phone. “Summer, this is Melody. Can you talk? How’d it go tonight with Lucien?” “Mrrumph…what time is it?” Summer asked, the memories coming back to her, and wondered if it had all been a dream.
“It’s a little after two.” Two? How long had she slept? She had cried herself to sleep, crumpled on the sofa.
“A.M. or P.M.?” Summer asked.
“Two A.M. Oh, I’m so sorry, Summer, were you sleeping?”
“I guess I was. It’s okay, I’m awake now.”
“Well, what happened?”
Only the end of my life as I know it.
“It’s over, Mel - we’re over. I think we both knew it had to be this way.” She tried to sound convincing.
“I’m really sorry,” Melody consoled. “Are you alright?”
“That remains to be seen,” she sighed.
“What about the dead dudes? Any info from him about them?”
“He never actually said that he wasn’t responsible, but he never said that he was either. I don’t know what to think.”
“Speaking of thinking, I was wondering, do you remember how many of those T-shirts we handed out that night? It sure seemed like a lot, and what if everyone who got a T-shirt is going to take a float trip down river?” That was a scary thought. Summer remembered signing and signing.
It had been a good turnout.
“Oh shit, Mel, I don’t remember how many of them I handed out and to whom.” Then she remembered the box. “Holy crap!” she screamed, bounding to her feet. “Melody, I just remembered that contest entry box is still in the backseat of my car!”
“Who gives a shit, Summer? Let the Petes worry about that dumbass contest.”
“No, Mel, the box has all the names and addr
esses of the people who received T-shirts! Oh God, why didn’t I think of this sooner? I could have taken it to the police and maybe stopped some of these murders.”
She was already throwing on her clothes and shoes as she juggled the cell phone. She grabbed her keys and took the elevator to the parking garage.
“Come on! Come on!” she bitched at the elevator for its slow descent.
Finally, it groaned to a stop, and the doors slid open.
With Melody still on the line, she raced across the garage floor to her car.
“Melody, I am going to take this box straight to the police, but first I want to see how many names are in there.” Summer unlocked the car and opened the back door.
The box was still on the floorboard. “Okay, here it is.” She paused a moment after opening it.
“Melody, something’s wrong. There’s nothing in the box. It’s emp…”
Something crushed the back of her head. A searing heat split through her skull. Summer’s eyelids fluttered, she toppled forward into the back seat, and then the lights went out.
***
A laser of white hot pain penetrated the inky depths of unconsciousness, shredding Summer’s brain. She tried lifting her head. Everything seemed upside down. She felt weightless and uncoordinated. Open your eyes, Summer, she willed. Open... your…eyes.
Her eyelids squinted forming two small slits; peering through the blur, the landscape looked foreign and surreal. Trying to blink the haze from her vision, she turned her neck to look around, and a lightning bolt of pain pierced her skull.
Above her, the low menace of growling rumbled in her ears. Everything was topsy-turvy. Up was down and down was up. She tried to wipe her eyes, but her arms were unresponsive, hanging limply over her head.
“Finally, you’re awake.”
The voice came from down by her feet…up by her feet…her disorientation was so complete, that she wasn’t sure which direction was which.
“I was beginning to worry that I had killed you before I could murder you.”
Swallowing the throbbing pain in her head and neck, Summer lifted her head to the direction of the voice.
“Hiya Summer! It’s me, Jerry. Do you remember me now?”
Jerry leered down at her. Between his feet, she saw legs tied with rope and suspended from what appeared in the moonlight to be a large tree branch. Her eyes opened wide in terror. They were her legs!
“Oh, hey there Summer, can I help you with anything today?” Jerry play-acted. “Oh sure, Jerry, just be a good little sycophant and clean things up around here, and when you’re done with that, how about you kiss my pretty ass too.” He mimicked her voice and inflections.
“Well guess what, Summer? I know what color underwear you’re wearing right now, because I have a bird’s eye view of your cunny from here.” Jerry rounded his fingers to his eyes like binoculars.
She tried to lift her head, but it felt like a forty pound pumpkin on a Popsicle stick.
“Oooh, I can see your perky little tits, too. Too bad, I’m gonna be the last person to ever see them. I want you to know that they are real soft. Do you moisturize?”
What was going on? She felt she was in a dream from which she could not awaken.
“Jerry,” she said, her words slurring as she tried to form them. She wondered if she had suffered a stroke. The words took so long to go from her throbbing brain to her mouth. “What… are…you… doing?”
“Oh, now you’re interested in what I am doing! You were never interested before.”
She tried again to move her arms, but they dangled above her head like a marionette.
“If I had known that hanging you by your feet above a wolf enclosure at the fucking zoo was going to be the thing that got your attention, I would have done that a long time ago.”
Summer dropped her head back trying to see the scene below her. Pairs of yellow eyes stared back at her. Undulating shapes, blacker than the shadows, weaved like strands of a living knot as they paced in tight circles below. Lips, red as blood, curled into snarls revealing rows of thick, white teeth. Summer gazed into the face of death and screamed, or tried to—she didn’t have air in her lungs and couldn’t force it up her throat. Her eyes scanned for a means of escape, but the only way out was down into the den.
“First, I’m gonna tell you what I’ve done. Then I’m going to tell you what I am going to do. And you, Summer Solstice…well, I guess that you are just going to have to hang around and listen to me talk for once.”
Had she died and gone to hell? Was this her punishment for loving a soulless vampire?
“Jerry, don’t…” “I thought I told you to shut the fuck up, Summer!” he bellowed. “I want to tell you what I have done for us, and you are going to shut your big fat flip mouth and listen!”
Summer closed her mouth. She burned with loathing for the little troll, but she had no choice but to do as he said.
“First, I took out that creep, Bob - no particular reason - just something about him that I didn’t like. I think it was when I saw him whispering in your ear, talking dirty to you at that kinky boutique, and you smiled.”
“No, Jerry, he wasn’t talking dirty -”
“Summer, shut the fuck up!” Jerry roared.
A fearsome growl arose from the wolf pack.
“I talk, you listen; that’s how this is gonna work,” he commanded, fixing her with an insane glare.
“Or I cut you loose right now, and you are a big piece of Summer jerky for those wolves. I hold the talking stick now, you got that?”
Her ankle joints tore with the weight of her body; the pain like rusty nails.
“I want to thank you for allowing me to take that contest box to your car. Those names and addresses made it so fucking easy to find those losers. I could tell that those ass-clown callers bored you, Summer. People who are that fucking boring should be drowned at birth.”
She heard the soft padding of feet as the wolves ominously assembled below her. She saw the movement of dark shapes, but her eyes were going dim, and it was like looking through gelatin.
“Then that French guy called you, and I could tell that you weren’t bored with him. What if he started to call you every night like I did? Where would that leave me?”
Jerry’s body tilted slightly off balance shaking the branch. Summer swung like a pendulum. There was that pumpkin head feeling again. Jerry just kept talking and talking. Why wouldn’t he stop?
“So, I decide right then that I had to get rid of him. You see, I know what that guy is, and you know what that guy is. I wish ole Frenchy wasn’t what he is, because it would have been a lot easier for me. If croissant-dick had been a human, I could have just thrown his ass in the river.” The blood rushing to her head was pushing her back into darkness.
Jerry’s words trailed off in the distance.
“Don’t fall asleep, Summer!” Jerry barked. The pack fidgeted beneath her, an occasional low growl rumbled through the shadows. “Not when I’m just getting to the good part. Don’t you want to hear my motive? Everyone wants to know the motive! Even the freaking damn wolves want to know my motive!”
Summer opened her eyes, willing herself into consciousness. She tried to assemble Jerry’s ramblings into coherence, but her brain wasn’t working right. Everything was muddy and thick, as if the events crawled through a muck-filled swamp, and by the time they seeped into her tortured brain, they were distorted and unrecognizable.
“It really was a great plan. I started knocking off guys right and left because I wanted to keep that French fuck away from you for good. I actually put the lights out on all of those guys in one night, but the fatter ones floated to the surface faster than the pencil necks, so they just kept finding them, day after day. That part I fucked up. I wanted them all found at the same time. I wanted to make a statement.”
Summer could see his eyes darting crazily as he revealed his sick-ass, diabolical plan.
“I knew they would cancel your show. Then tha
t fucker couldn’t call you anymore, and I would have you all to myself. But you started fucking that fucker, and well, I just can’t have that. You have to die. Just like those other loser assholes, Summer, you are too stupid to live.” The light of the moon glinted off of the long, curved blade of a knife that Jerry brandished in his hand.
Terror filled her lungs, invading all the spaces where air should be.
Her chest felt like a million balloons straining against a net.
“I mean, who in their right mind fucks a vampire? That’s just sick.”
He screwed up his face in disgust, spitting a glob of foamy saliva from his lips.
“I am very disappointed in you,” he chastised, shaking his head with disapproval.
“Vampires are extremely predatory creatures. Take it from me, I know. He was only going to use you up and then throw you away anyway, Summer. I’m doing you a favor. At least I am going to kill you all at once, not piece by piece like he will.”
A gust of wind whistled through the tree, shaking the branch to and fro. Summer’s body jerked on the rope. This was it. She was going to die at the hands of this maniac; she knew it! Her whole body trembled uncontrollably, tears sliding from the corners of her eyes and plopping to the ground below.
Jerry stumbled, nearly dropping the knife. Righting himself, he declared, “Alright, enough fucking chit-chat! This time Summer, I’m going to be the one to disconnect you!”
Jerry raised the knife. The wolves whined. The black clouds parted, unveiling a sliver of moonlight. A shadow emerged from the rustling leaves and a hand grasped Jerry’s raised arm, the moonlight illuminating his scarred and punctured wrist.
A Donor...Jerry was a Donor!
She wasn’t certain if she was dead or alive; if this was reality or a dream. It was Lucien, silhouetted against the moonlight like a dark angel.
The wolves bawled
“Etre silencieux!” Lucien commanded.
The pack cowered.
Summer observed what followed as if watching a macabre stage play from the wings.
Lucian lifted Jerry to his feet, holding him in the air with one arm. Jerry’s scream pierced the night. An ear splitting crack sounded. The branch gave away. She fell to the ground with a thud, fire ripping through her back. The ground vibrated as a second body slammed down. The snarl of beasts rose above the sound of tearing flesh. The smell of blood filled the air. A lone wolf charged for her neck.
Only the Lonely Page 14
