It had become a pulsing red iris in the sky looking down at the boy. Judging him.
“I know you like to kiss her. I've seen you do so. I just thought you might like to remember what it's like with me.”
“How you kiss is the wrong kinda sugar.”
“It's just different. Now shush. Nobody is going to tell the gypsy.”
Billy looked away from her eyes and focused on her lips. They seemed soft enough. She bore no fangs.
Anastasia whispered, “I won't tell her.”
“I'm going to tell her myself. How you tricked me and that it wasn't my fault.”
“No, you won't.” Whispers.
“I'm gonna tell her. She'll believe me.”
“No she won't.”
When Anastasia's lips finally touched Billy's he was shocked. It was a normal kiss and she did not try to bite him. Just lips and no moving from there to try and get at his neck. Anastasia had her hand on Billy's chest and pressed her palm to his heart. Billy's fingers opened and he dropped his skateboard to the ground, and there went his plan to catch her off-guard and to slam the deck into the girl and push her off him.
Anastasia had her head tilted to the left with Billy's to the right. When the last spot of red was swallowed by the hungry dark that had overtaken the moon, Billy opened his eyes and saw the outline of Lissandra standing by the bridge.
Watching and judging.
Anastasia looked over her own shoulder as Billy broke the kiss and smiled. “Oops.”
Billy Purgatory left the waves of laughter from the vampire in his wake as he ran into the forest after Lissandra. She was far too quick for him as she pulled herself up the rise beyond the bridge. When Billy pulled himself up to try and catch her I had already sent the herd to block his path.
I shouldn't have interfered.
IV
Lissandra found no cats waiting for her at the doorstep of the cottage when she arrived from seeing Billy and the Vampire together in the woods. It had no surprise seeing that Billy's vampire was real – he had told her about Anastasia and the time on the train. Billy had said that Anastasia was a liar and a fake and that he was glad he didn't see her anymore.
Lissandra had always sensed that there was something more going on between Billy and Anastasia. It wasn't in the way Billy talked about her – it was in the way that Billy avoided talking about her.
She shed no tears for Billy under that dark sky. Lissandra had no time that night for foolishness. If Billy wanted to kiss a vampire in the woods it had nothing to do with Lissandra any longer. There were much larger issues.
Lissandra knew her charts and there was no reason for the moon to have vanished. No reason according to the natural order of things, beyond magic of the most nefarious sort.
The door to the cottage stood open, and her aunt was no longer within. I should have gone to her and told her to return to the woods and never return to this place. No matter if Billy and Anastasia were still out there in the dark. I could have protected her.
Lissandra turned her gaze to the mansion on the rise at the far end of the estate. She had never climbed that hill before and she was far too quick and carried too much resolve for me to subtlety influence her. Humans are infused with free will; it's what attracted the gods to them in the first place. Lissandra's actions that night were no exception.
She passed the empty tennis courts and the slumbering horses within the stables. The Brickstaff children had been gone much of the summer visiting family in Europe. It was a quiet night near the end of summer and there wasn't even a warm breeze blowing over the great lawn to sway the trees.
She was imagining her aunt making the same long walk towards the main house. How many times had she done so over the years? How different was the walk she had so obviously, and out of her mind, made tonight?
The doors of the grand entry were thankfully just as silent as the rest of the world that night. Lissandra stood surveying the stonework and the statues occupying alcoves. A lone chandelier burned above and the weave of a Persian rug beckoned.
It was getting harder and harder for her to go on though. Why had Lissandra entered this place when running away from it for good had become so very inviting? The girl had lied to herself, taking those proud steps towards the fancy ironwork of the front entryway.
She had told herself on the way up that it was about family.
What about it, though? Her aunt treated her with utter disdain her entire life. It couldn't have anything to do with that horrible woman suffering from an affliction that could only be caused by a curse – a curse that her Aunt had coming to her.
She moved over Italian tile-work in banged up tennis shoes and her jeans with the holes ripped in both knees. She didn't feel much like a gypsy, cloaked in her T-shirt marked with grass stains – but she did feel compelled in her resolve suddenly to go on.
Lissandra could feel her grandmother up ahead. Impossible, but still, Lissandra felt it. She could sense the old woman's presence stronger than she ever had when she was alive. She never let her feet stop carrying her where they would, in the maze of twisting hallways and deceitful shadow. She refused to question her steps or to resist the pull.
Then she pushed open the doors to the library.
There is a difference between believing in things and witnessing things, especially if you're unfortunate enough to be human. In a vaulted room containing an extensive collection of the finest things the world could offer, all Lissandra could focus on was a sphere of dimes-store stage glass at the head of a pentagonal table.
She ignored the books, the scenes in stained-glass covering the windows, and the ornate nature of the wood-work. None if it mattered. Mr. Brickstaff in his smoking-jacket with the slicked back hair and the pencil-thin mustache didn't matter, neither did the vampire in dark jacket with the priest's collar and the stringing dirty hair in a ring around his bald head. Lissandra couldn't even make herself care that her Aunt was levitating four feet above the table. The woman's skin resembled a thick grey paste and the veins in her thin little arms were ropes intertwined like choking vines ringing around her bones. She hung there in the air, paraded above the room by magic and dressed in a green gown.
“That's my grandmother's crystal ball.” Lissandra didn't mean for the words to leave her mouth; they simply did.
Her aunt's face followed the direction of Lissandra's words and her mouth began to open. There was a gurgling noise from deep within what had been the woman's proud throat and her eyes were just as white and soulless as the moon was black.
“You're next.”
Then there was a cough, and Lissandra watched her aunt's tongue slide over her teeth and detach from her body. It fell to the table as something would in a slaughterhouse and the girl's knees buckled from the thud it produced when it slammed the tabletop.
Mr. Brickstaff said nothing as he produced and then raised a golden dagger from his jacket. The vampire watched the girl stand in astonishment, and it was worse that he did not laugh like Anastasia had in the forest. Their silence was so much worse.
The aunt floated down with a smile in her face as the edges of the table produced a blue flame with no provocation. Brickstaff raised the dagger with both hands above his head. The vampire beckoned for Lissandra. He did not hide his fangs from her sight: they were yellowed with age and stained in dark blood.
As the woman's body again rested on the flaming table, crushing what was left of her discarded tongue, Brickstaff let out a growl and plunged the dagger into her heart.
She died with a smile on her face, finally important in some evil way to the family she had devoted her life to.
Lissandra grabbed her grandmother's crystal ball from the table. The flames licked her fingertips and the heat from the magic left a burn mark on her soul.
The girl ran. No one gave chase.
Lost to her was the guiding force that had brought her through the house and led her to the library. Lissandra kept the crystal ball close to her heart as sh
e ran down one wrong hallway after another. Alcoves led nowhere and antique mirrors only provided erratic glimpses of her own fright.
She rounded a corner too fast, and just like Billy's birthday cupcakes, the crystal ball slipped from her fingers and flew into the stone floors. It shattered into cloudy shards scattering everywhere. Lissandra fell to her knees and cut her knees through the holes in her jeans on the glass and blood flowed from the palm of her right hand. She scooped at the glass with a bloody hand and the tears flowed and she didn't know what to do or where to go.
“You're next.”
Lissandra found the image of her grandmother's face in the thousands of remnants of the crystal ball that blanketed the hallway like a demon hailstorm. Lissandra slowly raised her head to find the visage of the ancient woman standing before her in her full fortuneteller regalia.
“Grandmother, what do I do? I'm next.”
The woman raised her arm and pointed down a hallway that Lissandra had not seen in all the confusion. The girl couldn't tell if her grandmother was real – or if any of this had been. Sadly, she was only human.
The hallway led out the back and Lissandra ran across the yard, bathed in a moon trapped in an unholy eclipse. The woods were ahead and Lissandra would find herself deep within their embrace before she let herself collapse, hiding under the branches of a fallen tree.
I sent a fawn to comfort her in the darkness.
Chapter 12
Night School
My earliest memories are of the old school we grew up in, close to the city but separated from it by enough urban decay and railroad tracks to keep the humans at bay. Our tip of the cove had been quite affluent at the turn of the century, but mankind is funny about where they live and what's fashionable. With the downfall of the industrial tract at our border most things became a ghost shell game of stagnant rotting boxes and factory brick.
Three ships have sat my entire life in dry berths rusting, one never even completed. What kept all but the casual voyeur of forgotten history or the squatters off our spike of earth has a lot more to do with the same emotional misgivings involved in not really staring ourselves at full force in the mirror. We don't want to look at our failures and those who came after the great men and women who built those yards and dreamed up those factories have a lot to answer for in the way of not living up to the potential of their forebears.
The world is a lot like that though, whether you be monkey breather, beast or night sucking monster - we've all become lazier and more selfish as time dances. Vampires do have reflections, but we avoid mirrors just as much as the lot of the warm veined human - at times even more.
My name is Anastasia, and this is how I grew up.
The children kept to the school, but the older ones, our fathers and their toys, lived in the mansions and factory shells that surrounded us. These two worlds rarely intermingled. We were watched over by the one called Uncle Priest. He was one of the ugly ones, and barely spoke. We mostly saw him lurking and taking secret talks with a council who was in full charge of our education and upbringing. We rarely saw them either. Our instructors would give us tasks that involved sending us to the ridiculously engorged library they'd fashioned for us. We were made to fight for knowledge, and what it ultimately led to was a lot of time to be bored and make up horribly twisted games to entertain ourselves.
Imagine high school, but with the lot of us actually trying to kill one another, and you'll have a pretty clear idea of what our nights were like. Cruelty and self-loathing were high on the curriculum. We had no guidance counselors to spur us to excellence. It was be the most clever inventor of the most deadly trap and hold onto your friends by the knives you yourself had driven into their backs. The alternative was finding yourself the guinea pig in another's cruel experiment to see who we could leave a slobbering, bloody mess. Have them banging their forehead against the brick trying to put out the voices in their head. “You'll never be prom queen, you're simply not evil enough.”
The one thing they did instill in us passionately was learning to fight, and by this I mean to actually fight. When we found ourselves face to face with an elder instructor, we knew that they were there for no other reason than to teach us the proper technique to turn our pale little hands into a killing instrument. Some new sword-fighting move would soon be ours to practice and subjugate. Anything and everything could be an effective weapon, especially our own bodies.
A pack of itching, bleeding wolves, rabid and costumed in school regalia, we were deadly enough with only our wits and a sharpened fingernail, let alone handing us a blade or a length of piano wire. We were sick, I suppose, with the ways of death - humans so soft and fleshy and so slow and ignorant of what our race was capable of doing to them. This sort of madness is when we shined. This was the class in which everyone had perfect attendance and all received an “A”, because a “B” meant we'd turn on you. A “C” meant you wouldn't make it to the next dusk bell ring.
I am not trying to impress you with our unthinkable acts of Vampiric-Darwinism, but I do try to impress upon you that growing up wasn't something you took for granted. If you survived, you were not to be trifled with.
Our former Master fancied himself a general, and we'd all heard the stories of how ancient he was and how many campaigns he'd fought against the humans, or siding with one aspect of man to enslave the other. His cruelty and tyranny was said to be legend even amongst the demons.
Standing on a conquering bank as the pyramids rose stone by stone across the river, cunning shenanigans all across Asia against the Huns. Back alley deals with the Reich and participating in the slaughter or the Monks for the annexing of Tibet. He was said to have laughed the day they dropped the first Atomic Bomb: “Mortals and their waste of blood.” He liked to brag that he'd drunk more than all of man's armies combined had ever spilled.
He's the one, I'm told, who took note of me on the field that night, and how young Billy Purgatory had become enraptured with me while we first tried to take him. It was his masterstroke to use me against the boy and it was ultimately his downfall to think that I'd ever allow myself to be coveted without consequence by a human.
When I was older and our home had fallen into chaos, I found myself so red with anger that I broke the unspoken rule of entry into the royal house and pushed past one confused and fearful sentry after another. My eyes glowed hot that night and it might have been by my own hand that the sparks flew which sent the place ablaze. I can't remember such insignificant details now. If I did start that fire, I can't be blamed fully. Our cancer was spreading and they'd made their putrid lives such rich kindling.
I was amazed at what a sad waste of a thing this overlord who had inspired such fear in my youth had turned into. His room was table upon table of dusty toys, pewter soldiers cast himself, lined up to replay the greatest battles of their history. How he studied them, hours wasted in darkness when he should have been out forging his own war against the air sippers, the sow on two legs, shaking their baboon asses at the gods and dreaming of a world so overflowing with baubles and beer and vanilla ice cream that they'd die smiling drowned and engorged on their own excesses.
Man has sugarcoated their reality to the point that truth is a meaningless distraction not even fit for their poets to piss a line about in the snow. Yet I realized that night, that we were no better. At least the monkeys had poets still.
Then I finally came face to face with him, hunched and stinking on a stool like he was about to milk the tits of madness. His spine like a gnarled root, his fingers bleeding on his only remaining hand, the left. He'd long ago lost the right arm, near to the shoulder in some battle with a demon. He smiled at having a visitor, his face eaten away by the vampire cancer and his excessive feeding of tainted blood. He reached out with an old scrap of leather that revealed itself finally to be a shoe.
“What am I?” This I asked, more calmly than I'd planned.
“Salvation of our race,” he answered dully. He hadn't fed properly in so
long, he barely retained fangs.
“Then what does that make you?” I asked.
“Can't you see?” He was puzzled now, like he'd plainly revealed a great secret and I was far too daft to see. “I'm again what I started as, a shoemaker.”
At his feet were cobbling tools. The shoe was covered in his own blood.
To say simply that I beat him to death with the first thing I grabbed would be understating the ferocity of the dam that broke within me and swallowed him with ravenous intention.
I left the burning ruins that night, crying the last blood tears I have ever spilled.
But I didn't cry for me, or for him, or for the last hoorah of the vampire clan by the shipyards who were burning to ash.
I cried for a memory.
My sisters were darker than I. This is a fact. They liked to toy with things. I might have become this way too, but I got bored with most foolishness much easier than they.
They had, one night, crippled a vampire boy because they said they had grown tired of his bragging. Actually, he had cause to brag; this had a lot more to do with them moving on him than their ears getting lazy to his words. He was the brightest among us, the most beautiful, the best at fencing and fighting. He was the sort who would let you know just how wonderful he was. I'm sure now that they saw him as a threat.
As perfect as he was, the boys were never as dangerous among us as the girls. We had that advantage of distracting you, charming you, and then slicing you to ribbons. Laughing as your blood poured when you didn't expect it. While you bled, our circling started, sniffing the rich iron air and making sure you never forgot who bested you. He was no match for the four of them all at once. I'm not sure myself or any would be. Well, perhaps there's one who could take them…
Regardless, the boy finished out his remaining days with a limp and a mouse ego taking control of his once reptilian super-brain. He never left the library again of his own accord. He was no longer friend to the night. More so, he made a pact with darkness - hide and protect me and my fear will caress you in repayment.
Billy Purgatory: I am the Devil Bird Page 11
