“Stop talking nonsense, little one. You know full well you're never in the way.”
Thanks Airas, I think and consider myself convinced.
“Okay, then I'll go back with you, but stop always calling me 'little one',” I reproach him for what feels like the thousandth time and I'm happy I don't have to stay here alone with my thoughts.
“You'd miss it if I stopped,” he says with the hint of a smile.
“You're right,” I admit and smile too.
Suddenly I throw the bedcovers back and sit up.
“Why can you control it and I can't?” I ask so suddenly that I surprise myself. I hadn't been meaning to speak my thoughts out loud.
For a moment he looks at me blankly, but then he realizes what I mean. He sits down in the chair next to the highboy and stares at the floor, lost in thought.
“You've asked me that before. To be honest, I really don't have a better answer for you. But I'm far from being as restrained and in control as you might think. At some point I learned to switch it off.”
He runs his left hand pensively through his short, blond locks, like a comb.
“How?” I ask in a squeaky voice and give a little cough to clear the lump from my throat.
Yes, tell me why you didn't rip Phil's throat open long ago and how you control it when you get close to someone and even go to bed with them. Tell me, how?
“How?” I ask again, but only softly.
“You know it's different for me anyway. I don't have an allergic reaction to preserved blood products and if necessary animal blood will do. The deep freeze is full. I hardly feel the all-consuming hunger anymore. At most its precursors, which I'm intimately familiar with and which warn me. That doesn't mean I don't sometimes still play with the idea of letting loose and making a huge mess though. Sometimes a fancy for something can be even more agonizing than the hunger.”
“But you have yourself under control. I, on the other hand—”
“Really? Do you really want to compare yourself to me? You don't have any choice,” he interrupts me and reaches for his smartphone, which is vibrating in his pants pocket. After a quick glance at the display he gives me a guilty look.
“I'm sorry, it's Phil – I just have to get this, but we'll keep talking in a minute, okay?”
I nod and he leaves the room.
My mouth is dry. I decide to go down to the kitchen to get something to drink. When Airas and Phil talk on the phone it's never a short conversation anyway.
Faint light penetrates the closed shutters on the ground floor and from somewhere close by come the raucous cries of seagulls. I open the fridge and reach for a bottle of mineral water from the side compartment. Suddenly my gaze catches on the blood bags on the bottom rack. Airas's supply for the stay on the island. I have to force myself to look away. I quickly open the water bottle and drink half of it down. When I put it back, my gaze falls on my brother's travel provisions again.
Almost by itself, my hand reaches for one of the soft plastic containers with the dark red fluid. It lies cool in my hand and I rub a finger over the label with the words O Positive, lost in thought.
What if I try it again? Isn't it possible my intolerance to preserved blood products and animal blood has resolved after all this time? What if the alternatives that have proven a good solution for Airas, so he no longer needs to kill, are also possibilities for me by now? What if my body is able to utilize it now and no more people have to die as soon as the beast inside me gets hungry?
I don't have to feed constantly like Airas does, I can get along fine without blood for weeks on end – but to do that I have to keep my distance from people, avoid body contact. If I manage to, the number of my victims is reduced to five or six in a year. Most of the time I manage not to exceed that number, but the price for this is a loneliness which on some days can be just as agonizing as the overwhelming cravings which spread through me every few weeks like poison. Only in a different way.
I open the sterile blood bag and breathe in the scent. My mouth begins to water immediately and my fangs shoot forth.
The fear makes me hesitate, but the prospect of a possible change in my life is like an enticing ray of light at the end of the tunnel.
Carefully I place the bag to my lips and am pressing the contents up when suddenly it's knocked out of my hand and falls to the ground.
Airas is standing before me and staring at me enraged. I drop my gaze in shock and stare at the pool of blood which is slowly running under the open fridge.
“Are you crazy? That's poison to you. Have you forgotten what it does to you? Do I really have to remind you?” he asks in a loud voice.
I shake my head.
“So what the hell was that then?”
“I wanted to try again,” I explain quietly and look him in the eye. His eyebrows are furrowed and his lips pressed together.
“Do you really want agonizing pain and febrile convulsions again? And for your hair to fall out and to end up nothing more than skin and bones? Because that's exactly what will happen. I've gone through it with you more than once you know. Do you seriously want to do that to yourself and me yet again? God, Kaya, what the hell were you thinking?”
Of course I remember how the blood products almost killed me; I even wished they would because the pain was unbearable. But I wasn't granted that mercy. My heart, which kept on stopping, would start beating again after a while and the suffering went on. As if death had spat me out again. Over and over. It didn't want me.
A seething rage rises in my throat.
“You don't understand. I don't want to kill anymore. I loathe myself for it,” I scream at him and slam the door of the fridge. But my anger won't let me be. I'm furious because Cassie is dead and I'm something I don't want to be. And I'm disappointed in myself, because I didn't even think about the consequences my spontaneous self-experiment would have had for my brother.
Airas looks dismayed and reaches for me, but I tear my arm away.
“I'm so sick of it all.” The words force their way out of me, and in the same moment I notice how unfairly I'm behaving toward him. We haven't lived together all these decades simply because we get on well. Without Airas I would be lost, thanks to my unpredictable nature. Hopelessly lost, and we both know it.
Sighing, I sink onto one of the kitchen chairs.
“I'm sorry,” I say quietly and can't look him in the eye. He sits down with me at the table and patiently lays a hand on mine.
I desperately want to tell him how torn and alone I feel, how tired I am of the life I possess in abundance yet seem to be missing. How this limitless existence suffocates me like an overwhelming nothingness.
I want to explain how incredibly huge the loss of Cassie is for me; how an important part of my negligible, little world has broken off. But I remain silent, and try to manage a brave smile; it turns out a lopsided grimace.
“I miss her too. It won't be easy to get by without her emails and texts each day,” he admits in a calm voice, and I gulp.
“Yeah,” I nod, “especially the ones with the cute animal pictures.”
Airas gives a light chuckle, and I can't stay serious either.
We always made fun of Cassie's love of animal photos.
“Listen, I know it isn't easy for you, but I'm sure it will get better someday. There aren't only doors that close, there are ones that open too.” He presses my hand comfortingly.
“Do you think there's a way out of this shitty isolation?” I give him a skeptical look.
Airas gestures to the blood bag. “Well, that isn't it, anyway. But if there is a way, then you'll find it.” His eyes are fixed on me.
“Do you really think so?”
My brother nods, and for a moment I feel hope in me. A tiny spark of hope I'll hold on tight to as long as I possibly can, because I suspect doubt will crawl out of its hole again very soon.
While Airas takes care of the last preparations for our journey, going through the house and checki
ng everything, I sit on the top step and stare down at the ground floor. That's where they found Cassie. Broken neck.
Guilt gnaws at me. Is it possible she shouldn't have been living alone anymore? Shouldn't I have noticed she was starting to have troubles due to old age? Why didn't she say anything? How did Cassie even fall down the stairs? Did she trip over one of those little beasts she'd brought into the house? There were at least ten cats, four dogs and some smaller animals.
The cats all escaped when we tried to catch them and headed for the hills. The neighbors took in the dogs, the other small pets and the hens. Of course, only because Airas 'convinced' them, as we like to call it. Our ability to force our will on people and control their thoughts.
I stand and go into Cassie's bedroom. It's the largest of the three bedrooms on the top floor. The other two are the guest rooms for Airas and me. Because of our light sensitivity, the curtains are usually let down to about an inch from the bottom. Although we spend most of our time elsewhere, Cassie always saw this house with its thatched roof as our family home.
She left her mark on it in every way. It's decorated in a romantic Greengate style: lots of white furniture and pale linens with flower or patchwork patterns, just as dainty as the clothes she always wore.
Her bedroom is bright too and filled with lots of pastel colors. Even if it's not necessarily to my taste, I've always felt particularly comfortable in this house. Only the animals really got on my nerves, with their hostile attitudes. Every time I took even a single step inside the house, the hissing, growling and menacing began, so Cassie shut them in one of the rooms or banished them to the garden.
Some of them took to their heels in fear. I can't fool animals – I'm transparent to them. They recognize the beast in me immediately.
Cassie. I stroke the quilt on her bed, lie on top of it and close my eyes. Jasmine. That was always the fragrance my little sister liked and which accompanied her everywhere. The whole house smells of jasmine, but here in her room the scent is so strong I can almost feel Cassie's presence.
Again, I feel this pressure closing off my throat. But it's not only the longing for my little sister that torments me. The yearning for my dead mother and my father scream within me too. Where on earth could he be? He promised to come back. I've been missing him ever since our parting on the 12th of September, 1891 at the Port of Almería. I was nine years old then. The memories are so clear and bright in my head, as if it were only yesterday I last saw my father. The pressure in my chest feels unbearably leaden and heavy now, and like so often, I feel the tears in me but my body won't set them free.
Before we boarded the large ship that was to bring us to safety in the north, we said goodbye to our father behind an old shed near the Spanish port. Airas, who was eleven years old then, had to promise him he would take care of Mama, Cassandra and me.
“Look out for the girls, my son,” said our father in a solemn voice, his face lined with worry.
“Yes Father, I will,” Airas promised bravely. But the shaking in his voice and the shining of his eyes gave away how difficult parting was for him too.
Cassie sobbed and gripped our mother's skirt tightly. My father knelt down and kissed her on the forehead.
“And you, my girl,” he turned to me, brushing a strand of hair out of my face and looking me in the eyes.
As full of sorrow as my heart was, I met his gaze calmly and without tears. I could guess how great his pain must have been and didn't want to make it even harder for him. He was the one staying back alone to protect us. I may not have understood everything, but I knew we were all in great danger.
“You have to stay strong. We will see each other again, Amkaya,” he promised and kissed me on the forehead too. I dug my fingernails through the material of my skirt into my thighs, to prevent the tears from running down my face after all and him seeing. The physical pain distracted me. I had to stay strong, for my father, for my mother and for my brother and sister. My tears really did dry up then. They never came back. Even when I longed for them to.
The picture in my head of my father embracing my mother, who cried silently and wrapped her arms tightly around his neck, makes my heart bleed.
“My beloved Emilia,” he whispered and kissed her.
My mother was an extraordinarily beautiful woman, with long blonde hair. Her large eyes were an intense blue which made her gentle face look somewhat elfin. Her voice still echoes in my ears:
“What will they do, Ramon? What will they do to you? What if they kill you?”
“I'm already dead. You are my life,” he answered her with a soft smile on his lips. She buried her head in his shoulder, sobbing loudly.
“Promise me you'll never come back here, nor look for me. I will find you.”
My siblings and I nodded silently.
“Swear it,” he demanded and we made a vow.
“You have to go now. The ship will leave soon,” he said in a firm voice, then turned and disappeared into the darkness.
3
Ramon
You might think at the bottom of the sea you would be enveloped by an all-encompassing silence, but even down here I can sometimes hear the voices of sea-farers amidst the whale song. Some days the ocean currents even bring voices from the mainland down to me in my dark, icy grave. Meanwhile, I'm paralyzed and damned to wait here, fully conscious. To wait and to hope, that one day this will end.
But until then, I'm alone with my thoughts and fears. With a pain that has no end, and a hatred that almost drives me insane because I have no way to vent it in this enforced inertia which confines me like a steel corset. It feels like an eternity that Violette's spell has kept me down here and I have nothing I can pit against her magic.
I'm at the mercy of the voices in my head, my thoughts which revolve around Emilia and our children. My cries ring out in my head alone, and madness is my constant companion.
How much time might have passed by now? Years? Decades? Not knowing how my beloved Emilia and the children are doing is dreadful. I write an infinite number of letters to them in my mind. I hold monologues, which channel the flood of thoughts for a while and nurture my hopes that they might be able to feel these thoughts, wherever they may be now. Hatred for the vampire-witch positively eats me up inside sometimes.
Then I escape into the beautiful memories and dreams; see Emilia's enchanting smile before me; bring to mind our time together and inebriate myself on the love that floods my consciousness.
I really did love my first wife Rebekka. She was a good and beautiful woman, but what I feel for Emilia is different, and something for which words have yet to be invented. It is indescribable. When I'm with her it is as if we are deftly and everlastingly interwoven.
She makes me forget what a monster I had become. Through her, I found a part of myself I'd believed was long gone, since I died in 1809 and continued my existence in damnation.
I remember the night of my transformation as clearly as if it were yesterday. It was the night Rebekka died in childbirth.
I screamed my pain out at the sea, fell to my knees and pressed my fists, head hung, into the golden-yellow Andalusian sand of the little bay at Almería. Rebekka's lifeless face seemed to haunt me, and the pain it evoked was like a dagger in my heart. That night, I lost not only my wife, but also my son.
“We are blessed, Ramon,” she had told me only a day earlier when the first labor pains began, smiling and laying her hands on her belly. “God made us wait a long time, but tonight our son Alejandro will be born.”
“How do you know it's a boy?” I had asked and wrapped my arms from behind her to lay them on her stomach.
“I know it, Ramon. I can feel it so clearly.”
The memory of her smile burned that night like salt in an open wound. With my arms crossed, still kneeling, I held tight to my torso as if to keep it from breaking to pieces. The emptiness that spread through my insides took hold of me and the whooshing of the sea seemed more and more like a promise to free
me from my pain and the emptiness. From one second to the next, life seemed to have lost all meaning.
“Ramon.”
Confused, ripped from my thoughts, I looked to the left toward a gigantic rock jutting out of the water. Leaning on it was the figure who had spoken to me in a dark and insistent woman's voice.
“Who are you?” I asked nervously into the darkness, and the figure took a step forward, enabling me to discern her contours.
“Do you really want to know?”
I nodded in confusion and wiped the tears from my face with my sleeve. Because my vision was blurred, I rubbed my eyes with the back of my hand.
Yet I still couldn't make the figure out any better.
“Do you believe in God or a higher power, Álvarez?”
“How do you know my name? Who are you?”
“My name is Violette.” She gave me a friendly smile. “You haven't answered me yet. Do you believe or not?” the stranger asked again in a serious tone of voice which, nevertheless, seemed to contain a certain amusement.
“Show yourself,” I demanded and made to stand. But then she was already by my side and sat down next to me in the sand. For a moment I was confounded by her shape. The dark red dress with white lace accentuated her slim body. Dark curls framed the beautiful, oval face, which was so white that it seemed to shine in the darkness. Almost a little incredulous, I shook my head. Were my senses playing tricks on me? Was she an illusion and I was going crazy?
“No,” I replied in a weary voice. “I did believe, but now I'm not so sure anymore. Maybe it was all just wishful thinking, false hope. And if there is a god, then he's an. . .”
I broke off and pounded my fist into the sand.
Her loud laughter bewildered and fascinated me at the same time.
I stared at her in disbelief and considered whether she really was a figment of my insanity. Maybe the pain had made a madman of me, who talked to figures that didn't even exist. I suppressed the desire to touch her in order to solve the mystery. My fear of grasping at nothing or touching this strange woman disrespectfully was too great.
The Night Within Us: Dark Vampire Romance Page 2
