For The Sake of Revenge_An Alaskan Vampire Novel

by DL Atha

  Fear set in, and I tried to push it back, but I didn’t have the strength. I was too tired. Maybe if I’d been more rested and less mentally frazzled, I might have stood a chance. As it was, I gave up and went to my bedroom before I lost all control and ended up on the floor.

  My muscles went lax, and I didn’t try to stop them as I melted onto the bed. My vision tunneled, the ceiling above me growing more distant by the second until the tiny hollow circle that remained disappeared.

  I’m not sure how long I was asleep before the dream began or if I was dreaming at all. The experience was more trancelike. I knew my world existed, and yet I couldn’t interact with it. I couldn’t feel the ceiling fan blowing above me or see the light from the lamp on my nightstand, and I didn’t have the power to stop the vision that formed around me.

  I found myself standing in a clearing about fifty feet in diameter ringed by towering spruce trees. They appeared as old, robed men standing guard, their outstretched limbs cloaked in undulating layers of lichens; the tips of their branches pointing like fingers of skeleton hands at me, trapped in the center of the clearing. Nests of snow broke up the dark green of the forest floor while springy moss cocooned my feet. The ground was flat like the coastal plains that stretch along the ocean, and in the distance, I could hear the light lap of the ocean licking at a shoreline.

  The moon hung heavy overhead in a near cloudless night. The moonlight glinted on the pockets of snow and the dampness that perpetually glazed everything in the path of the mists floating in from the nearby ocean.

  I was not alone. I could feel him behind me, and his presence overwhelmed the forest. Nothing moved. No animal called out to its mate. Not a single birdcall broke the silence. The forest was paralyzed, and I barely breathed myself, my diaphragm frozen with fear.

  I didn’t acknowledge him at first, except to turn ever so slowly in his direction, my eyes firmly planted on the ground in front of me. I couldn’t force myself to look up. I couldn’t force my shaking muscles to stay still.

  I was still trembling when cold skin brushed my cheek, the caress of a finger that traced a line from my eye to the corner of my mouth and continued down until it rested under my chin. He tilted my head with the barest pressure of his finger until I could not escape his gaze any longer and then I could not look away. I could not force my paralyzed muscles to move.

  “You know my name?” he questioned.

  My mouth was dry; my tongue felt like sandpaper, and I swallowed, looking for extra moisture, but I could find none. His name cracked across my vocal cords as I tried to speak.

  At my efforts, he smiled. But it was a frosty expression—frigid actually.

  “And you know what I am?”

  I nodded once, the smallest of movements.

  “And still you pursued this relationship?”

  “I need your help, Adrik,” I said finally finding enough air to form a whisper.

  “How very refreshing to hear my name uttered by a human tongue after so long. And such a beautiful human at that.”

  His voice was low, his Russian dialect older and more guttural than I was used to. I struggled to translate, relying on the mental images that floated across the bond from him to me to help understand his words. I swallowed hard as he began to circle my body, his finger tracing a cold outline around my shoulders before spinning me around and trapping my head in his hands. His thumbs traced the thin skin of my eyelids before stroking my cheekbones. His cool fingers traced my trembling lips. There was nowhere to look except at him as he studied me.

  He was easily the most beautiful man I’d ever seen, and although I wanted to close my eyes against such scrutiny, it was impossible to look away from such perfection. He might have appeared an angel except his eyes could not have been any less clear or any warmer than glacial ice. His thick black hair was neither short nor long, and a few errant locks arched across his forehead, daring me to push them aside. Spikes of black lashes accentuated the coolness of his stare.

  A thin beard ran from his sideburns and traced the thin outline of his jaw before highlighting the contours of his mouth. His tall frame was hard, lean underneath the thin cotton clothing he wore in the dream. His feet were bare as were his arms, and the coldness of the dream didn’t seem to affect him as it did me. I shivered with the chill, and even more where his hands touched me.

  And touch me he did. Dropping his hands from my head, his hands snaked out to stroke my arms and shoulders, one hand brushing against the underside of a breast. I sucked in my breath harshly, taking a step backwards at the intimacy of his touch. I barely registered the movement of his arm as he forced me to tolerate his hands. I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t real. This was all just a dream.

  The corners of his lips lifted in a small smile. “What did you think was going to happen when you strengthened the blood bond? Did you think our encounter would be all one-sided? That I would seek nothing in return?”

  “The surgeon didn’t mention your ability to touch him in the journal,” I answered.

  “I had no great desire to touch the surgeon,” he whispered, his hand sidling down my hip. “I desire a great deal to touch you, however.”

  His desires drifted through the bond we shared. It made my lower belly ache even while my skin tingled with fear.

  “I need your help,” I whispered again, forcing myself to concentrate.

  “So your innocence is no longer in question, and you are willing to bargain after all. I am glad. I find innocence quite a bore.” He continued to stroke my body while he spoke, and no amount of reminding myself that this was a dream helped.

  “What will it take to get you to help me?” I asked, struggling to maintain eye contact. Looking at him must be the way a mouse felt looking into the eyes of the eagle that held it.

  “A payment of blood, of course,” he answered.

  “Whose?” I questioned.

  “So quick to give up any pretense of humanity,” he said. His beautiful lips turned up a little more in a wicked smile. “If only it were that easy, Tamara. But I have a large wooden stake coated in iron through my heart, so although you want this Joel you are thinking of to pay the price for you, I do not see how you can force him to remove the stake embedded in my body. I believe you are going to have to pay the blood price yourself. But I give you my word, once you free me, I will sup on his bones.”

  “I don’t understand,” I answered, staring at him in confusion.

  “What is there that is difficult to comprehend, Tamara? You have sought me out. Did you not understand the consequences?”

  “I knew I would have to bring you up. I just didn’t understand that I would have to die for it!”

  “I have lain in the ground for two centuries paralyzed by this stake through my heart. It must be removed for me to rise, and whoever does this deed will die a gruesome death. I will have very little control because I am burning with hunger.”

  I stared at him dumbly while his words sunk into my overwhelmed mind. Finally, I realized the gravity of my mistake.

  “No!” I shouted, lashing out with my hands at his face and chest. “I don’t deserve to die! Joel does, and I deserve to see him dead, and my mother deserves to be avenged. I have paid enough!” I hissed. “Joel has hurt me in ways that you can’t possibly understand.”

  “Ways that I cannot possibly understand? Woman, do you realize whom you speak to? You speak to a man who gave up his soul for revenge, and you shy from simple death? You have paid nothing in comparison.” His expression was even icier as his fingers cut harshly into my arms.

  “I let you in my head, didn’t I? I’ll spend the rest of my natural life with you in my dreams. Surely that has to be worth something,” I said.

  “Nightmares? Did you honestly think that would be the only cost of revenge? Did you believe that you could simply unearth me, and I would be at your service?”

  I dropped my eyes, but not before he noticed the guilt in my expression. A poker face had never be
en my strong suit. His eyes widened with realization before narrowing in a frightening look.

  In the next second, fire burned a painful path through my head. I grasped the sides of my skull and screamed as he ripped through my thoughts, ferreting out the secret ones I’d tucked away. The plan I’d hidden was displayed for him to see.

  “You miserable bitch,” he hissed, backhanding me to the ground.

  With no time to catch myself or put up a struggle of any kind, I landed hard on my back, the air knocked out of my body with the sudden meeting of the ground. I watched as my breath hovered above me, a gray wet cloud that I couldn’t retrieve.

  Adrik was on me before I could draw a breath back into my empty lungs. With one hand, he dug strong fingers into my throat. He tangled the other hand deep into my hair and forced my neck back so it was even harder to find air. I gasped in his hands, struggling to breathe.

  Can he kill me in my dreams? I wondered. Was that possible?

  Logic surfaced for the briefest of moments, reminding me that I was not really in his hands in this cold forest. His fingers were not truly curved around my neck. In reality, I was lying on my bed in my warm house.

  “If I convince your mind that you cannot breathe, rest assured, you will not breathe,” Adrik whispered into my ear.

  “It’s mind over matter,” I mouthed back at him.

  Enough air had seeped into my lungs that my diaphragm had relaxed slightly and the pain between my shoulder blades was beginning to subside.

  “When I get through with you, Tamara, you will not have enough mind left to worry about,” he said, pushing my head backwards into the ground with his index finger. “So your plan was to unearth me and point me toward the blood of your enemy, and in my great gratitude, I would kill your enemy. And then you would stake me in my day sleep? You thought you could locate my resting place, easily enough, through the blood bond. What a cunning little bitch you are.”

  Having nothing to say, I stared at him coldly.

  “You should be warned, it is unlikely I would have let you live knowing where I rest. It is a vampire’s greatest secret.”

  “Then turn me into a vampire, and I’ll kill him myself.”

  “I want no children, Tamara. I will never mark another.”

  “If you have no control, what’s to keep you from marking me when I pull that stake out?” I questioned.

  “It requires no more control or effort to rip the heart from your chest than it does to sink my fangs into your vessels.”

  “Then I’ll pull the stake out during the day while you’re weak. Then you can kill Joel. It’s simple.”

  “And how do you propose to find me during the day when the sun has dominion and I am incapable of leading you to me?”

  Studying his face, the realization of what he was saying and the truth about what I’d gotten myself into slowly worked across my mind like the punch line of some bad joke I’d been too slow to get.

  “It is quite simple, Tamara. I make you one offer. Give me your life, and I will give you the revenge you seek. By my honor, Joel will pay for his sins,” he answered calmly.

  The space between us was very small, made even smaller by the anger that radiated from each of us. The moon hung behind him as he remained leaned across my body stretched out on the forest floor. I could have heard a pin drop on the ground beside me in such stillness.

  “It’s that simple, huh? Was it that simple for you, Adrik? I don’t really understand, honestly. You were accused of rape, not murder. None of your loved ones died at the hands of this woman. How does that compare to the hell I’ve lived? Joel killed my mother, and he will kill me too.”

  “I was a slave, beaten like an animal!” his voice roared. Snow rained down from the trees with the echo. The ground shuddered underneath me. I clamped my hands across my ears, but he jerked them down, pinning me to the ground again.

  “I lost my god,” he continued. “I was excommunicated from the church which was the only thing I cared about. Is it not worse than death when you must give up eternity as well? I would have gladly given my life or selfishly that of my family’s if I could have saved my soul. Death pales in comparison.”

  With each word he shook me until, finally, his anger became too much, and he could find nothing else to say. I watched the rise and fall of his chest as he struggled to control himself before shifting my gaze to his face. Never have I felt such an intense gaze as the one that held me now. The strength of his arms was weak compared to this paralyzing hold of his eyes. I could do nothing but watch as he tongued the tips of his fangs for the span of a heartbeat before lowering his mouth to my neck.

  My skin parted beneath his lips and blood rose to meet him. He exhaled longingly against my neck and, wanting more, he pushed his fangs deeper, my vein splitting beneath their hard points. His assault lasted for only a few heartbeats, and then he was gone.

  I sat up, my hand catching the blood at my neck, and searched the darkness for him, but I couldn’t make him out among the shadows.

  A few feet away, a log lay half buried in the snow. I crawled to it and pulled myself up until I was sitting, more or less, while I struggled to catch my breath. The temperature of the dream was dangerously cold, my clothes were soaked through and I was shaking from a combination of temperature and fear. My fingernails were a light blue, and through my clothes, I could feel the roughness of the tree bark I leaned against.

  How can a dream feel this real? I wondered.

  “I remember this night with clarity. I lived it once, many years ago, of course,” Adrik answered, reading my thoughts as he solidified from the darkness. “This is where I was interred for the final time on a night just like this one,” he said. He tapped the stump with one foot.

  “Why here? It just looks like another part of the forest to me,” I answered between breaths. Curling my feet through the snow, I dug my toes into the earth, recoiling as the dirt pushed itself beneath my toenails and between the digits of my feet. I could hardly imagine being buried alive in this cold, wet ground beneath my feet.

  “It is as terrible as you imagine and much, much worse,” he whispered as he studied the pieces of sky visible through the clouds. His expression had turned from cold to pained with that one sentence.

  The misery of the experience worked its way into his voice, his emotions coursed through our blood bond, and even though I hadn’t experienced what he had, I could feel the terror and fear of what he’d suffered—apparently was still suffering. If the mud on my toes made my skin crawl, I could scarcely conceive what it would be like to be covered with the muck from head to toe.

  What would I be like if I’d been buried for two centuries? I might not be able to put together a coherent thought or carry on even the most basic conversation. The surgeon had apparently come closing to losing his mind in a very short time just by hearing Adrik’s thoughts, let alone actually living them. And yet next to me, this vampire, Adrik, set calmly and able to put intelligible words together.

  “Do not put too much credence into my sanity. It fails me completely most every day when the sun is highest in the sky, when I am so weak that I cannot even flex the fingers of my hands, when I cannot lick my parched lips. That is when my mind turns to foolish babble and I curse every human I have ever known. I curse the dead who sleep peacefully unto the Second Coming and the woman who bore me upon this earth.”

  “So you’re here,” I asked, gesturing to the landscape around us. “You’re buried wherever this place is?”

  Nodding his head yes, he turned towards me once more. “I am buried only a few feet right below where I stand now. It is where I was first cursed. Where I first took human life.”

  “You’re talking about the child. The native child that you accidentally killed.” I studied his face, seeing traces of something other than rage in his eyes. They were softer, warmer, if only by a shade.

  It was impossible to not notice him as he sank down onto the log next to me, to not recognize the perfection
of his features. The blue ice of his eyes or the way his eyebrows made perfect dark arches above them. I couldn’t help but study the strength of his jaw, the perfection found in the curve of his lips any more than I couldn’t help but want to brush back the errant locks of hair that tried to hide the budding emotion of his eyes.

  “Few emotions are left to me at this stage. I do not pretend to care much for humanity, but I think in becoming a vampire, the strongest of your emotions are what carries over to the next life. They are what define you. For me, it was the experience of Irena and that of the child, of course. It has been over two hundred years, and still the boy’s face tortures me.”

  “Guilt and rage,” I mouthed, more to myself than him. “I know them well.”

  “A potent combination, would you not agree?” he responded.

  “Do you still hate Irena?” I asked.

  “On that point, I have never wavered. The solidarity of my emotions regarding Irena has softened the blow of lying buried in the dirt these two hundred years. It is also a help that I can hear her screams reverberating through the earth. Unlike me, she was buried on hallowed ground. Her father sought to save her, but he only made her condition more miserable instead. The very ground itself makes her writhe as it works to thrust her unnatural body from its hallowed midst.”

  “I bet her screams mix nicely with yours,” I said, instantly regretting the words before they’d even cleared my tongue. I have no idea what possessed me to say it except that this was at least in part still a dream. My internal filter wasn’t fully engaged.

  His cold gaze washed across me, returning to lock on my eyes. “Women are the coldest creatures of all.”