by Martha Woods
Chapter 12
Sara didn't know what she expected when she started looking for answers. She was a pragmatist, who had always questioned superstitions and even religious belief. She didn't believe in all-seeing old men in the sky or fairies running around the fields. Everything was as it seemed, and there was little room for fantasy. Now she was being forced to accept that a vampire killed her mother and that somehow she summoned up a blue fire to kill two security guards.
The intrigue of it was not enough to make her want to fight to live. She didn't care about whether or not Caleb's brother killed her. Caleb said that she would see her mother when she died. Trying to die was a lot more fun than hiding in her grandmother's house all day.
So Sara promised herself to stay out as much as she could. Caleb could follow her if he wanted, and probably would. That'd be part of the fun.
He was quick to catch up with her while she started down the road past the school when class got out. “You're not actually walking, are you?”
She was trampling the grass through the field. “Yes. I thought it'd be fun to go out for a walk.”
“You're trying to get yourself killed, aren't you?”
“We'll see.” She picked up her speed, hoping to leave him behind but he matched her pace quickly.
“Why are you making this so hard for me?”
“I'm not.” She started uphill, farther out into the fields, hoping to cut through the hills to get to her house without having to walk on the side of the road.
“Yes, you are.” He laughed.
“I'm helping you find your brother.” He grabbed her arm and spun her around so that she was trapped, facing him.
“I'm not talking about him. I'm talking to you. You know damn well that if you keep this up, you're going to die. Why are you making it so hard to keep you alive? Do you really want to die this badly? Because Sara I can assure you it's not an easy death. He'll take his time and drain you so that you're barely alive. Then he'll start tearing you apart. First,” his fingertips ran along the place where her shoulders met her arm. “He'll dismember you. Then,” he stroked some hair behind her ear. “He'll take what little of you is left alive, and he'll roast you slowly while you scream. Do you want that?”
“Yes.” She looked up at him.
He held his head down low. “Why?” He sounded angry.
“Because then I'll get to see my mother.”
“Without ever having lived.” His hand brushed her cheek, and his eyes crept out from behind his black bangs. “Without ever having fallen in love, you're ready to die. You don't even know anything about life or the world you live in. There's so much to see. You can see her anytime you want to. You'll only get to be here once.”
“But I don't want to be here without her.”
“Not at the moment you don't. You're short-sighted. But in a few months or in a few years you'll wish you'd stayed. You're staying here, and I'm making sure of it. So walk around as much as you want to. It's not going to work.” He let her go, and she turned around to keep walking through the field.
“I thought I was making it harder for you to keep me alive.”
“You are. That doesn't mean I can't do it. It just means that sometimes you have to get used to the idea of me following you around everywhere and I have to spend all my time doing it. It also means that I won't get to have a life outside of watching you.”
“You're a vampire. What kind of life could you possibly have?”
“I don't know.” He sounded kind of defensive. “Mostly we just keep ourselves company, but I wanted to go cliff diving today.”
“Cliff diving? Wait, the first night your brother attacked me, I saw something flying down off the cliff. Was that you? I saw this light.”
“It's a lantern I take when I go diving. It's waterproof. That way I can see underwater.”
“Do you cliff dive?”
“Yeah. Why?”
It was strange to think of Caleb just running and jumping off a cliff. “I can't see you doing anything like that.”
“I can take you with me.” A smile crept over his lips. “It's totally safe.”
“Do it.” She turned left, towards the beach.
“You're not even worried?”
“No. You said it was safe.” She didn't really care either way.
“It is. We're only doing safe activities.”
“Well, I trust you.”
“Are you sure? You trust me enough to jump off a cliff with me?”
“You don't want me killed. You've made that very clear.”
“You're right. Only safe activities.”
“Like jumping off a cliff with a vampire.”
He laughed at the irony. “Come on.” He snatched her up in his arms, cradled her like a baby then started running. He moved so fast that the wind, barely a soft breath before, slammed into her entire body, blowing her hair back against her face. The world flew by like she was driving through it at a thousand miles an hour. One second they were standing in the field. The next, they were on the cliff trail, winding in between the boulders until they reached the edge and he set her down on a boulder.
“What?” He was staring down at the water, then back down at her again.
“It's ju—
“What?”
He grabbed her back up again, ran to the edge and hopped off. “Don't be afraid.” His whispered was nearly lost in the pounding tide of air rushing past her.
They were racing down towards the water, hundreds of feet below. Sara thought she was going to lose her mind. Sara had never been more excited in her entire life. He was barely holding her, just around the waist so that she could spread her arms out wide and pretend like she was flying.
“WHOO!” She twisted and spun while he moved along with her. She was falling like a leaf with the wind blowing her this way and that. The water below was a boiling tide of navy blue, so dark it almost looked a solid surface and it might as well have been because the force of the impact would snap her head right off her body the second she touched it. She could die. There was no way of knowing whether or not this would work, but that just made it even more exciting.
She wasn't afraid, even when they started to get closer and the water was all that she could see. She wanted to let it break her to pieces, and smash here until there was nothing left than a red dot in the water.
She shivered, and her skin was tingling. It was getting close enough that she felt like she could almost reach out and touch it. A spray came off the waves and hit her in the face, like tiny daggers of ice piercing through her skin. She was going to die. Nothing could travel this fast, make an impact and survive.
He flipped her around so that she was facing the sky. That way he could break her fall. Then he took her in his arms as tightly as he could and held her head above the water expertly as he pounded against the waves and swam her out to the beach.
By the time he pulled her onto the shore, she was shivering, huddled close against his chest. He laid her down in the sand and stroked her cheek. The sun was directly at his back, illuminating him as he reared up, tore off his wet shirt then stared down at her, a smile creeping over his lips. “You're shivering.”
“I’m cold.”
“Here,” he let her rest against his shoulder and covered her with his arm to shield her from the wind. “Did you enjoy that?”
“Immensely.” She moved her finger along his white chest while she watched the sky fade from blue to indigo as the sun fell.
“Do you still want to die.”
“I just don't want to live. I want to make all of this pain go away, and that's the best way I know how.”
“Hmm.” His eyes drooped for a moment.
“Do you know what it's like to die?”
“I've never done it, but I do know about it.”
“Tell me.”
“They call it piercing the veil.”
“The what?” She sat up to look at him, and he turned his head to meet her gaze.
“Kind of like falling off a cliff.”
“Yep.” He nodded his head. “I died when I turned into a vampire. We all do, but our transition is cut short. Vampires are forced to maintain a consciousness that is both physical and spiritual to stay in this world.”
“You're dead.”
“More dead than you are. When we die, we disappear. There's no heaven or hell, no afterlife—just death. We trade in eternal life for a second longer on Earth.”
“That's terrible. I thought you couldn't die.”
“There are forces out there that can unseal our spirits and push them out of our bodies. It's rare when it happens, but most of us do die eventually.”
“There's a lot out there that I don't know about.”
“Most people never get a single look outside their fragile reality, and that's comfort, Sara. There are things out there that neither you nor I could possibly imagine. It's best to live your life in ignorance.”
“When I found my mother dead, after I overdosed, the cops brought me back and tried to accuse me of her murder. They chained me up and took me to the hospital. Then they locked me up in a cell while I withdrew from opiates. I started hearing voices in there, telling me how to erupt this blue fire out of my fingers. These two guards came to get me so they could put me through PET scan and take brain imagery. They beat me, threw me around on a leash and ultimately ended up violating me so badly that the fire erupted out of my fingers. I turned the men to ash without even thinking about it and found myself waking up in my grandmother's guest bedroom. What does that mean?”
He seemed disturbed, staring up at the sky. His face went dark for a moment as if Sara had said something terrible. Then, all at once, he pounced on top of her and drove their lips together. “It means,” he laughed with his body pressing against hers, “that you have an extraordinary power inside of you and that I'm going to do everything I can to give you a reason to keep on living.”
She rested her arms around his neck. “What does it really mean?”
He kissed her again. “It means that you're a witch.”
Chapter 13
“Where have you been?” Margaret rushed out onto the porch the second that Sara reemerged onto the property. She hopped down to confront her granddaughter.
“I was cliff jumping with a vampire.”
She sighed. “Just get in here.” She grabbed Sara's hand and threw her in. “Of all the reckless,” A wave of hot air spewed out of the woman's finger and started drying her off, “stupid things I've heard.” She backed up and stared at her wide-eyed. “Were you really cliff jumping with a vampire?”
“If I'm not going to get answers from you I'm going to get them wherever I can find them. Teach me what you just did. Now.”
Her grandmother turned around, pointed her finger at the kitchen stove to turn it on and levitated a bag of noodles down from the cupboard. Another twitch and they were in a boiling pot of soup.
“Don't you think for one second I'm going to watch you do that shit and keep it all to yourself.”
“I had my reasons.”
Sara sat down across the table and watched her pace around the kitchen.
“What reasons?”
“Magic attracts them, Sara. Young practitioners like you can't fight them. You'd end up using it, and they'd attack you. Now, you've got vampires walking you home and throwing you off the cliff. You're doing their job for them. Are you trying to get yourself killed?”
“Yes.”
Her answer caught her grandmother off-guard while she considered it a moment and ultimately collapsed into a chair across from Sara. “I didn't know you felt that way.”
“After I found her, I took a handful of OxyContin. The EMTs had to bring me back. When they did, they accused me of killing my mother and locked me up in the hospital.”
“I knew you were there. I just didn't know why so I brought you back as soon as I could.”
“Were you the one speaking to me when I was locked up?”
“No. It a shadow, a nonliving entity that acts as the witch sees fits.”
“I killed two men with these blue flames shooting out of my whole body. Did you really think I'd just give it up?”
“No. But you don't understand. Magic draws the Vampires, Sara.”
“Then you need to teach me.”
“I need to trust you first.”
“Hey, you left me in the dark.” She started getting defensive. “I had no idea what they were, just that there was one sitting a couple yards away from me in the lunch room. Of course, I got up to talk to him.”
“Don't do it, Sara.”
“He saved me twice.”
“What are you talking about?”
“His brother has been hunting me. He killed mom, and he's been trying to kill me. Twice when I was in the fields near the cliffs, he tackled me and tried to drink my blood. Caleb stopped him, used his blood to heal my wounds and even gave me a blood transfusion. He's not dangerous.”
“It's like dealing with a wild animal. One moment you'll be walking through the grass together and the next he'll rip your throat out. There's something sick about them. They're not natural. They're a product of ancient blood magic. The spirit inside them is like a virus. Once it passes into their blood, they turn into killers. They do it for fun, for sport, or just out of boredom. They haunt you for decades, pretending to be your friend or lover. Then, when you're at your happiest, they'll kill you. They don't go slowly either. They take their time and draw it out.” Her mother screamed like that. “The spirit craves blood because it represents the full, physical form it'll never be allowed to take. The shedding of blood and the pain that accompanies it, gives it a sick, twisted sense of satisfaction, greater than anything we could possibly experience.”
The way Caleb looked, his comical, yet innocent style, he would've been like an infernal jester, goading her while he tore her to pieces. He was calculating, cold and maybe vicious but there was something dark and alluring about him. She wasn't going to stop seeing him. He was the ultimate thrill offering the best of two worlds. She could live a little while longer and still know that an end to the pain was coming.
“They get to you, Sara. If you learn anything from me, you'll know to stay away from them.”
“What is this spirit? He told me he was a spirit trapped in a body.”
“Yes.” She motioned for two mugs to fly off the counter and land softly in front of them. Then she whispered something softly and a clear liquid shot out of her finger. “The Vampire Curse is a prehistoric binding, said to have been cast when the matriarch of a tribe of hunter-gatherers lost her lover. He ran away into the hills rather than stay with her. She was a spiritualist named Mana whose individual skill was the ability to speak with disembodied creatures. That's when she came across the jealous spirit.
He was jealous of our bodies. Earthly don't have the ability to choose where they go or what they do. Their bodies are much lighter so they can't touch things the way we can. He could drift in the wind and watch us. That was about it. That's all he did was a watch, angry because he had no way of affecting the material realm. Mana found the spirit and talked about it for days. It claimed to have the ability to take somebody's life which was beyond her own power. So she forced the spirit into her lover's body, hoping it would kill him. Instead, the mind of the man melded with that of the jealous Spirit and the Spirit trapped him in his shell so he could never die. Now, the spirit lives on in them and hunts the blood, drinking it to satisfy its inherent need for the physical.”
“Can't they fight it? He told me that he stopped when he was younger.
”
“I've heard of them doing it. Maybe they do fight the spirit, but you can't fight yourself forever. Rapists and murderers feel sorry for the things they do, but that doesn't make them stop. It's a part of who they are. That's why your mother promised me to never teach you.”
“What happened to her?”
Margaret turned around and flicked her wrist, sending the pot off the boil. “When she was younger, she fell in love with a vampire. Sara didn't know what he was, or what he was really doing. All she knew was that she wasn't going to tell me a single thing about it. That was just her way. She didn't want me meddling in things, I suppose.” She took a sip from her mug which was sending off the stark aroma of peppermint and a hint of liquor. “I knew that she was seeing somebody. Otherwise, she would've been home, so I let it go on for a little while until I pulled out my tarot cards and figured out what was going on. When I found out that he was a vampire, I forbade her from seeing him. She refused, of course. She was sixteen. She ended up having to be rescued from atop of a cliff a few hours later. After that, she swore off magic.”
“Why? I mean I'm sitting here, watching you make dinner and move things around without even giving it a second's thought.”
“Vampires are like flies hunting down filth so they can devour it. They'll always find you. You'll never be safe from them. I am older than you will ever know and not once, not in my entire life have I managed to escape them.” She looked around. “This isn't my sanctuary. It's my prison. Because of my protective charms, this is the only place I'm safe. The second I step off the land, it's hunting season.”
“Well, can't you kill them?”
“I'm capable of it, but I wouldn't dare,” she laughed. “Where there's one, there's a hundred. They'll come at you with some ancient grievance, saying you killed their long lost lover or their family. They love fiery vendettas, and one springs up as soon as one of them gets killed. The only thing you can do is stay put because they will do anything to have you and they're smart. They've had centuries, a few even thousands of years to learn how to hunt.”
