Biting the Bride

by Clare Willis

  At around midnight she felt tired enough to try to go to sleep, so she sloughed her clothes off onto the floor and climbed into her comfortable bed. Sometime later Sunni heard sounds in her bedroom. She was sure she hadn’t been asleep but when she checked the clock it was 3:42 A.M. At first she wasn’t frightened by the noise. It sounded like air blowing out of her heater. But she didn’t turn on the heat in June. She kept her eyes closed while she tried to locate the source. It wasn’t coming from the window, which was on the other side of the room and closed against the early summer fog. When she finally identified the small but distinctive noise she thought she must still be dreaming. Someone was sitting in her bedroom, reading a book.

  She opened her eyes. The room was completely dark and she couldn’t see a thing. The pounding of her heart drowned out the quiet susurration of pages being turned. As fear made its slow burning journey from her chest to her limbs the room lightened, as if the window shades were being lifted. She saw her slipper chair in the corner of the room near the closet, and a man sitting in it, one leg crossed over the other, nonchalantly swinging a foot clad in a gleaming leather oxford.

  “Good evening,” Richard said with a smile. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “What are you doing here?” Sunni choked out the words.

  He held up the book he’d been reading so that she could see. It was the pink leather journal her mother had given her when she turned seven. Sunni had kept it through all her foster placements, hidden in the nooks and crannies of the various houses she was cycled through. Mostly it contained a litany of misery: foster parents hitting her, other kids stealing her few possessions, not fitting in at any of the schools she attended. When she moved to the LaForge house she had pretty much stopped writing. It had been locked in a drawer in her desk, the key in her nightstand.

  “I’ve been so curious about you, you know. I hoped that this little book would give me some answers. But I must admit, I found it as cryptic as you are in person. You’re not used to sharing yourself with others, are you, Sunni?”

  She sat up, pulling her quilt over her chest to cover the skimpy tank top she was wearing. The heavy thudding of her heart filled her ears. Jacob must have been right. Something awful was about to happen. This man was going to kill her, kidnap her, rape her, or do something she couldn’t even contemplate. She thought about her encounter with Peter at the wedding and wondered if she’d be able to fight Richard off. Right now she wasn’t feeling capable of anything.

  Richard stood up gracefully and crossed over to the bed. Sunni gasped and shrunk against the headboard.

  “I have upset you. I am sorry. I don’t mean you any harm.” He took a glass of water from her nightstand and offered it to her. “Here, have a drink.”

  He stood next to her while she sipped, like a parent who’d been called to the bedside of a child having a bad dream. After he replaced the glass on the table he sat back down in the slipper chair, lifting the knee of each pants leg so that it wouldn’t wrinkle.

  “There, that’s better. In the restaurant we were talking about your parents, who they are, or were, I suppose. You knew your mother until you were eight, as you said at the restaurant. But nothing about your father?”

  “Why do you want to know about my past? What do you want from me?”

  “It’s not about what I want, it’s about what you want, and what I can give you.” He tapped the journal with one finger. “You always knew you were different, yes? That was one thing I was able to glean from your journal. Only unlike most adolescent girls, you actually are different. It was what sent you to the mental asylum …” He shook his head. “That’s not what they’re called now, are they? No matter. What did you first notice about yourself? Are you a particularly swift runner, for example?”

  Her fear began to be replaced by other emotions. She was angry that he had stolen her journal and amazed that he had done so without tripping her burglar alarm or even waking her up. She was still frightened, but also had the sense that finally someone had come into her life who might answer some of the questions she had had for as long as she could remember about her own identity. As strange as Richard was, there was something familiar about him, something almost comforting.

  Sunni cast her mind back, to before her mother died. She remembered playing kickball one day with a few of the neighborhood kids. She was playing outfield. The ball was kicked into the street and she went after it. A car was coming, fast and heedless. A little girl screamed. Everything slowed down. Sunni crossed in front of the car, grabbed the ball out of the air and stood clutching it while the car whizzed past, its wheels inches from her sneakers. After the car passed the children stood staring at her in disbelief. When she walked back onto the sidewalk one of them touched her, as if checking to see if she was a ghost. The little girl who had screamed refused to play with her ever again.

  “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  “Can you see in the dark?” Richard asked. He gestured with both hands at the darkness in which they were both enveloped. “Obviously yes, but not always, or you wouldn’t have that lamp there. Are you exceptionally strong? Are your reflexes quicker than that of humans? ”

  Sunni’s jaw dropped. Not only was he speaking of her physical anomalies as if such things were commonplace, but he was referring to humans as if they were a different species. What did he think he was?

  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  Before Sunni could blink he was sitting next to her on the bed. She hadn’t seen him move at all. He put one finger out and ran it over the surface of her nightstand, and then examined his finger. “Not much of a housekeeper though, are you? No matter, that’s what we have maids for. Do you know what you are, Sunni?”

  She shook her head, her heart thudding so hard she was sure he could hear it.

  “You should be proud. Your kind is very rare, because it is illegal to make them. So, like any scarce commodity, you are very valuable to those of my kind. There are many people who would like to get their hands on you, Sunni.”

  Sunni clutched her blanket, her hands trembling. “What am I?”

  “You are a dhampir. The offspring of a human and a vampire.” Richard eyed her with approval.

  Sunni closed her eyes. She took a breath and opened them again, taking in the familiar objects all around her. This wasn’t a dream. How could such a strange encounter be happening in this familiar place? How could such beings as Richard Lazarus exist? And yet she’d always known she was different. She had tried to push it to the back of her mind, to ignore it, but it always came back. She had tried to find out the truth from her mother, but whenever she asked Rose withdrew further—into silence, into drugs, into the black hole of depression Sunni was sure she had created when she was born.

  “How did it happen, how did I become this way?”

  Richard smiled. “The usual way. Surely I don’t need to explain that to you?”

  “No, I meant,” she rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know what I mean anymore.”

  “I’ve never understood why humans find these revelations so shocking. After all, they’ve been bandying these myths around for a thousand years, where do they think they come from?”

  “So you’re a vampire?” she whispered.

  “Of course.”

  “But,” she paused, sifting through a cacophony of thoughts. “I’ve seen you during the day.”

  He chuckled. “Yes, you have. Sunlight only affects the young. By the time you’re my age it’s just a nuisance.” His gaze fell on her neck and he licked his lips very delicately. “But the part about drinking blood, that is true.”

  She shuddered, but didn’t move away. This must have been what Jacob was talking about, this special nature of hers. But in Jacob’s version Richard was dangerous, he had “targeted” her, although for what she wasn’t sure. But now here was Richard himself, sitting on her bed like a girlfriend at a sleepover, freely offering information that Jacob had been loath to provide. If he was a threa
t why wasn’t he acting like one?

  Breathing shallowly, Sunni stroked the quilt that lay over her lap. It was an antique, soft and velvety from countless launderings, hand stitched by a loving woman to keep a family member warm. Although she’d bought it at an estate sale, Sunni liked to imagine that her own mother had made it for her. It conjured up a childhood of stability and protection that Sunni could only dream about.

  “So why am I so valuable to vampires? ”

  “Because you are one of the only things that can kill us.” He pinned her with his gaze. “What has Jacob Eddington told you about me, Sunni?”

  Her first impulse was to protect Jacob. “Nothing,” she said.

  Richard clicked his tongue. “Nonsense. He told you that I meant you harm, didn’t he? That you needed to escape from me?”

  Sunni didn’t nod, but she could tell that Richard knew what she was thinking.

  “It’s him you need to escape from, my dear. Do you know why he’s been watching you all these years?”

  “You know about that?”

  “I didn’t, but when I saw him at the restaurant I figured it out. He works for an organization that keeps track of people like you.”

  “He said they keep track of people like you.”

  “Well, that is true, too. They are afraid of me, and of you, for that matter. He is watching you to make sure that you don’t learn to use your powers, because if you do you might use it against them.” He ran one hand lightly down her arm, causing her to shiver. “If that happens he has orders to kill you.”

  “You’re lying.”

  He gripped her arm, just hard enough to make her wince. “Look into my eyes.”

  She did. They were dark, fathomless, revealing nothing. “Trust, so hard to come by. Why should you trust me? He has protected you all these years, or so you think. But isn’t that part of what jailors do, keep their prisoners from harm?”

  She couldn’t argue with his impeccable logic, not now, in the dark, when she felt so vulnerable and he seemed to know so much about her. “I guess so.”

  “Tell me about your mother, Sunni. ”

  Sunni’s hand crept to her chest, inadvertently drawing his eye to her rose tattoo, with its thorny vine and three tear-shaped drops of blood.

  “Her name was Rose?” Richard asked.

  “Good guess,” Sunni muttered. “What was your first clue?”

  “What kind of a mother was she?” His gentle voice invited her to confide in him.

  “Sometimes wonderful, sometimes a nightmare.” Sunni was surprised to find herself answering him so candidly. Maybe this was how Isabel gave away the information about the Ashwood Institute. “She had drug problems, depression. But I felt like she was the only person who ever understood me.”

  “How did she die? ”

  “She had left me alone one Saturday, probably to go score. At that time we were living in Redfield, a little town in Marin County. There was a yard, surrounded by a picket fence, and I was playing under a tree. A black limousine drove up, with two men in it.” A tear dripped out of Sunni’s eye.

  “Let me guess what happened next,” Richard said. “You liked these men. You felt at home with them. They knew all about you, knew your name and your mother’s name. When they asked you to get in the car you said yes.”

  “That’s right. But my mother arrived then. She fought them.” Tears flowed freely down Sunni’s face now. “It was horrible. I’d never seen anyone fight like they did. For years I was sure I imagined it. One of them had a rope and he started to strangle her …”

  Richard nodded. “But then someone else arrived, right?”

  She stared at him in surprise. “How do you know that?”

  He ignored her question. “This other man saved you from the two men, pulled you out of the car?”

  “Yes. How can you possibly know these things?”

  “I was that man. ”

  Shock rendered her incapable of speech, so she simply stared at him.

  “Do you want to know who the men in the car were? They were vampires, Sunni, working for the Council, the organization Jacob Eddington belongs to. You’re contraband, and they came to take you away.”

  “If they wanted me so badly, why didn’t they try again later?”

  Richard shrugged eloquently. “Your mother was dead, your father gone. As long as you thought you were merely human you were no threat. So they just kept an eye on you.” His hand snaked out and smoothed her hair behind her ear, then dropped down to cup her chin. He turned her face to look at him.

  “Come to London with me, Sunni. I believe we could be very happy together. ”

  Her breathing sounded strangely loud in the quiet, night-wrapped room. At first the proposition made perfect sense. Richard and she were kindred beings: they shared not just a personal history, but also a cultural and biological history that went back thousands of years. Richard could teach her about herself, he could show her how to love and accept everything she was.

  She turned so that her chin would be released from his grip. All these things might be true about Richard, but if they were, they were also true of Jacob. As strange as he had been acting toward her, she was not going to give up on him yet. She might feel a strange affinity for Richard, but what she felt for Jacob ran much deeper.

  “I’m sorry. That’s not going to happen.”

  She felt the change that came over Richard as a certain heaviness in the air, as if a thunderstorm was coming. His eyes, already a deep brown, became so dark that they appeared to have no pupils and the lamplight glinted off them like they were made of polished granite. Instead of sitting next to her he suddenly seemed to be looming over her, and the expression on his face was that of a hawk who had just sighted a rabbit.

  “You dare defy me?” He wasn’t shouting, but his normally pleasant voice now had an edge that could cut glass.

  Sunni’s voice failed her. She clutched the soft quilt and pulled it up to her shoulders.

  Richard grabbed her chin again and yanked her head up and to the side, exposing the tender expanse of her neck. He bared his teeth, grimacing like an angry dog, exposing long white fangs that almost pierced his lower lip.

  “I could kill you so easily, drink your blood, and take your strength into my body. ”

  A whimper escaped from her throat.

  He dragged his fangs along her neck, pressing just hard enough to break the skin, and then licked the blood that he had released. Sunni squeezed her eyes shut. She was not a religious person, but she began to pray silently. A moment later she felt his weight lift off the bed. She opened her eyes to see him buttoning his suit jacket. The anger was gone. He was back to being cool, composed, and utterly self-possessed.

  “But I will not kill you. That would defeat my purpose. I shall simply have to move on to Plan B.” He shot his cuffs and checked the fastenings on his gold cuff links.

  “Plan B?” Her heart was starting to beat more slowly, reassured by his distance from her.

  He gave a small snort of annoyance. “Do you not understand this colloquialism?”

  “I understand it. What is your Plan B?”

  “You’ll find out in good time. But now, my dear, you are tired. We’ve talked enough. You should sleep.”

  “But I still need to know …”

  There was a rustle and a rush of air, and Richard was gone. It was only a few minutes later, when the room grew cold, that Sunni realized he had left the window open.

  Chapter 10

  When Sunni woke up on Wednesday morning, after tossing and turning for hours and then finally sleeping a bit once dawn broke, she sat up in bed and scanned the room for evidence that the previous night wasn’t a dream. Everything looked exactly as it had when she went to bed, from the glass of water on her nightstand to the trail of clothes she’d dropped on the floor. The key to her desk drawer was in the nightstand, right where it always was. She jumped out of bed and went over to her desk. The journal was in the locked drawer, burie
d under three years’ worth of tax forms and credit card statements. She put her head down on her arms and breathed slowly and evenly, trying to think rationally.

  Richard and Jacob were vampires. Just that statement was enough to send her back to the Ashwood Institute. And yet she didn’t feel crazy when she contemplated it. The myth of vampires had been around as long as human civilization. Why shouldn’t the myth be based in fact? If it was true, it actually made her feel less crazy, because the cognitive dissonance she’d been feeling all her life was based on something real.

  She straightened up and looked at her desk. What else had she learned? Both of them were old, old enough that the sun didn’t bother them anymore. They drank human blood. Did they kill people? Richard hadn’t answered that one. Was Richard dangerous to her? The jury was still out on that one as well. But if he was, was he also dangerous to Isabel? She grabbed her cell phone and hit one of her speed dial numbers.

  “LaForge residence.” It was Earl, the house manager.

  “Hi, Earl, it’s Sunni. Can I speak to Isabel?”

  “She’s still asleep. She came in quite late last night. Can I give her a message?”

  Sunni heaved a sigh of relief. “It’s nothing urgent. Just tell her to call me later. ”

  She padded into the kitchen and made coffee, then settled on the couch in the living room with her laptop and a steaming cup. After pondering the spelling for a moment, she Googled dampire. “Do you mean dhampir?” the helpful engineers at Goggle suggested, and Sunni clicked on the word. A Wikipedia entry came up first, followed by a site called Monsterpedia. She surfed over to the Wikipedia Web site and read the entry.

  A dhampir in Balkan folklore and in vampire fiction is the offspring of a vampire and a human. Dhampirs are powerful creatures, equipped with a vampire’s powers but none of the weaknesses. A dhampir is believed to be unusually adept at killing vampires.