Darklands: a vampire's tale

by Donna Burgess

  “I’ll have another chance,” Devin said.

  ***

  Susan led Devin upstairs, the front of his linen shirt wadded in her fist, pulling him along playfully. She coaxed him with small, wicked kisses, her tongue slipping across his mouth briefly and then away, like the touch of a butterfly. Ascending the winding staircase, she guided one of his open hands over her breasts. Her nipples hardened and stood out through her thin t-shirt.

  “Wild thing,” he muttered, clearly surprised. “What is this, anyway?”

  “This is me pulling you out of the funk those people pulled you into.”

  He laughed softly. “People? When will you learn the difference?”

  “I know the difference, Devin. I just can’t get used to the terms.”

  At the top of the stairs, Susan kissed him once more, and then she jumped up, hooking her arms around his neck and wrapping her legs tightly around his waist. She loved the warmth of his tongue, the malty sweetness of scotch inside his mouth. Effortlessly, he carried her to their room. His big hands cupped her ass, and his mouth never left hers. He kicked the door closed behind them.

  Together, they fell across the bed. For a moment, she buried her face in his hair. How she loved the tickle of his soft hair against her face, the smell of ginger shampoo and the faint hint of oak-wood smoke from the fireplace.

  They undressed each other, their lips exploring greedily.

  Devin nudged Susan’s thighs apart and entered her slowly, as if savoring every moment, every movement, and every incredible, excruciating thrust. He slipped his hand between them and stroked her just like she wanted to be touched. Her orgasm began to build, and for a moment, she thought she would faint if she didn’t come soon. He drew his wet tongue up from the cleft of her breasts, over the front of her neck and across her chin, ending again at her mouth. He was huge, his cock like hot stone. Susan pressed her face into the crook of his shoulder to stifle the cry she felt building behind her lips.

  She closed her eyes and for a moment, she imagined the coppery, salty scent of his blood thrumming beneath his skin. It was maddening, and she flicked her tongue out to taste him.

  He drove into her harder and faster. With her teeth, Susan punctured his flesh, drawing a small, pained groan from him. With a slight turn of her head, she opened the wound just enough for his blood to flow across her waiting lips.

  She drank from his vein then, arching her back against his sweat-slick body, she came. A moment later, Devin exploded into her, his eyes closed, his face beautiful in the moment. Then, he bent and kissed his own blood from her lips.

  They drifted to sleep together, a tangle of limbs and covers. Devin cradled her protectively against him.

  “I love you, you know,” he whispered against her ear.

  “Then never leave me.”

  ***

  Susan slipped down the sweet spiral of slumber. As sleep was only beginning to hold her in its grip, she thought she heard Devin whisper, “I’ll be back.”

  She wanted to respond, and even thought she had, but only sighed and turned onto her side.

  A few minutes later, John’s voice drifted to her, annoyed. “The others need a leader or else Kasper is going to kill them all. You know that. They blame you, but they also look to you.”

  Devin’s reply was clipped, annoyed. “I’m no leader. I want to be left alone. I want Susan to be left alone. I don’t care what happens to any of them. She’s all that matters, now.”

  She heard drawers opening and the faint sound of clothes being shuffled around. Then, “And since when did you decide to become the voice of my conscious, anyway, John?”

  “Someone needs to be.”

  She was faintly aware of the sweet brush of Devin’s lips across hers, the tickle of his warm breath on her face, and he was gone.

  Sleep grew denser, heavier, and she dreamed that she reached out for Devin, but no—not Devin, but Peter. She wanted to laugh over the fact that he had fallen asleep beside her.

  However, it was not Peter because even in the storybook of her dream, she knew he was dead. Instead, it was Michael, snuggled warm and easy at her side. Sunshine floated through the window in dusty, soft rays. How she missed the warm kiss of sun on her face, the heat on her bare shoulders as she ran through the park and along the bay back in Hamilton. She looked at Michael, the sun touching the blue of his eyes and turning them the pale blue-white of a ten a.m. sky.

  He laughed and kissed her. She wanted to cry.

  ***

  Susan awoke with her face stained with tears. The covers were wrapped around her like a fist, and she kicked at them to get free. The room was too muggy, and cool sweat layered her skin.

  Devin was gone. Thinking of things that might have been dreams or not, she knew that Devin was searching for Kasper Jacobsen. She wondered if Michael had actually taken her advice and left. She doubted it. He was a man, after all—stubborn and pigheaded. If he had stayed, was he still alive? She thought of the scrap of paper he had slipped into her pocket, the one he had jotted an address on. She had saved it in the depths of her coat pocket, where Devin wouldn’t find it. She would need to send Michael on his way before something terrible happened to him.

  She climbed from the bed and grabbed the robe that Devin had left for her. She pulled it on and cinched the belt about her waist, then went downstairs to find John.

  John was in the library. He was still dressed in his pajamas and a red silk robe that made him look especially debonair. He had graduated from the cognac to scotch, and a lot of it by the looks of the decanter, which was nearly empty. The fire had died to glowing embers. Basie and Holiday at the Savoy played softly on the small digital stereo that sat atop the middle shelf among the books and various trinkets. Susan was willing to bet that somewhere in the house he had the vinyl 78 stored away, immaculate and scratch-free.

  “Hi,” she said, rapping on the open door and entering at the same time. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  John stood wearily. “Hello, my dear. And no, not lately, anyway.”

  He motioned to his chair, but she took the ottoman opposite. He then sat back down.

  “Where are my manners? A drink?” He picked up the decanter from his reading table and swirled around the dregs at the bottom.

  “No, thanks.”

  He shrugged, poured the amber liquid into his glass and drank it down.

  “So, Devin’s gone to find Jacobsen, hasn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long until sunup?”

  John glanced at his watch. He laughed and shook his head slowly. “It’s only a quarter of three.”

  “What happens if he doesn’t come back?” Susan sighed. “Look at me, John. I would have never chosen this kind of existence if it were not for him. He can’t leave me like this.”

  “I seriously doubt that’s his intention. He only wants to make things safe for you. Safe for the two of you to live together.”

  “I wish we could just leave,” she whispered. Thoughts of Michael popped into her mind again. She had made her decision when she allowed Devin to drink her blood, when she decided to drink from him, not that she had an option, really. Again, she wondered if Michael had returned home.

  What would he say when people asked about her?

  “Jacobsen managed to find us here. He won’t give up.” John stifled a cough with the back of his hand. “Besides, I want to see that bastard dead after all he’s done. He deserves to suffer.”

  “Maybe we all do,” Susan said.

  “Perhaps so, but some more than others.” John looked at her a moment, then leaned forward, took her hand in his and squeezed her fingers gently. “Don’t worry.” He stood and pulled her to her feet.

  She rested her head on his chest, and he slipped his arms around her. Slowly, they began to sway to the music. “Lillian and I used to dance to this very same music.”

  “In your pajamas?”

  John chuckled softly and stroked her hair. “Sometimes.”


  ***

  After she left John and returned to bed, Susan was resolved that sleep was not in the forecast—not with Devin spending most of the night looking to confront a mad vampire hunter and was still out, despite the coming daylight. Yet, she was dead asleep when her head hit the pillow. Perhaps she owed it to the fact that she had finally given in and drank some wine with John, or perhaps it was the slow dancing and the mellow music. Nevertheless, sleep came. Unfortunately, nightmares were still the order of the morning.

  Morning—even in dreams, the dawning sky bled in around the heavy shield of the drapes.

  Where the hell was Devin?

  Although he was not in the bed next to her, he was certainly inside her head, but the space was small and crowded since Michael lingered there from her earlier dream.

  They were in some shabby, dank room where others had died. Devin stood over Michael, just as he had done the night they left Hamilton. He raised one blocky fist high over his head.

  Susan opened her mouth to scream, to warn Michael to wake up, but no sound came. She grabbed at Devin’s arm, but he cut through her as if she were nothing but vapor.

  Devin’s fist plunged into Michael’s chest, all the way to the wrist. Michael’s eyes fluttered open, and the smallest gasp slipped from his lips. His eyes met Susan’s for a fleeting moment.

  There was a wet, sucking squelch as Devin yanked Michael’s still-beating heart from his chest.

  Blood flowed as if it had been twisted on like a faucet, the metallic, salty scent filling Susan’s nostrils.

  She jumped awake just as the dream-Susan leaned over Michael’s dying form to drink her fill from the chasm of his chest.

  She sat up, her legs twisted into the sheets. Next to her was Devin, warm and sleeping.

  “Okay?” he asked sleepily.

  “I’m just glad you’re home,” she answered. She snuggled against his warm side and stroked his hair, silently cursing herself for her dreams. The residue of those images would stain her thoughts for hours.

  chapter thirty-five

  John stoked the fire inside the stone hearth and brought the dying embers back to life. He tossed in another slab of oak and then straightened up, his back complaining as it did most days lately. Volumes lined every wall from floor to ceiling. Many were left from the original homeowners and were as old as the house itself. The others, his books on psychology, by Jung, Freud, Skinner and subjects such as behaviorism, humanism, and existentialism, sat along tattered horror tales, legends, myths and folklore. Vampires. Werewolves. Demons. Most, he had read and reread a dozen times over.

  He had been a professor of Behavioral Science at Imperial College in the late 1920s, but had gotten enough by ’35. Later, he took a position at a horrid, nightmare of an asylum called Knowle Mental Hospital. But it was not long before the patients began creeping into his nightmares. The conditions and the treatments plagued his waking hours. He battled the supervisors constantly the year he was there, finally throwing his hands up and retiring with Lillian to their country house. They were blissfully poor, despite the luxury of the old home itself. He spent his time farming, writing, and taking in the stray vampire or two. He snorted a bitter laugh and pinched the bridge of his nose. A headache was building behind his eyes.

  He sat down in his leather reading chair and considered finishing off the cognac from the flask that now sat on the side table, but decided not to. The alcohol had helped put him into this foul mood.

  Devin had returned, and he felt an odd mixture of relief and disappointment. John had little doubt the time would soon come when Devin did not come home. Devin was no killer and frankly, not much of a hunter, either. Jacobsen was both.

  In the beginning, John had allowed Devin to remain under his roof because he viewed him as merely another case study. He had assumed the man insane from the day they found him cowering like a wounded animal in their barn. A vampire? More likely a psychotically depressed individual. Hallucinations. He indeed thought Devin to be dangerous, just as he told Lillian, perhaps not a Nazi, but certainly delusional. Nevertheless. . .delusional or not, he deserved protection from a fiend like Kasper Jacobsen.

  Talking to Susan about Lillian had brought old heartaches to the surface again. Thoughts and memories of his dear wife dogged him like a ghost, reminding him of the things he could not change.

  When Lillian had transformed, it had felt like a dirty secret. The few acquaintances they had, they visited in the depths of night under the excuse of that she had developed a rare allergy to the sun. The two of them ventured out to a pub for a pint from time to time. Later, she would leave him and run the shadows with Devin. John loved Lillian and had come to love Devin, as well, but he hated what they were. However immortal, John felt they lived on borrowed time. Kasper would not relent. Devin had mentioned that he had seen him skulking around the village. It was only a matter of time before he found them.

  John considered turning Devin over to Kasper, as a bargaining tool for peace, but in the end, found he could not. He loved the man like a son, a replacement son for their sweet Ian. Almost.

  Suddenly, it seemed that Lillian had regained her youth. Her movements were fluid, as graceful as they had been twenty years before. She had still appeared a woman of fifty-one, but it was now a fit and lively, somewhat dangerous, fifty-one. She was no longer the woman she had been, beaten down with arthritis. He remained a middle-aged man, unflinchingly, frustratingly, unaltered. Of course, there were benefits. She was insatiable in bed, which made him wonder if she was sleeping with Devin, as well. Part of him doubted it. They were obviously inseparable, but he felt that neither of them would consider hurting him. Still, did she see Devin’s face in the darkness above her instead of his? For more than two years, it was a marriage of three. Or was it four, with the three of them always searching the shadows for Kasper Jacobsen?

  If memories of Lillian lingered like a ghost, it was the last moments he saw her alive that laced his nightmares.

  Kasper had managed to catch her alone, just outside the barn, feeding her kitties. Dusk had been just setting, heavy-handed and quick in the English autumn. He had set her afire. He had somehow drenched her slender form in petrol and then put a match to her as if she were so much rubbish. The barn went up around her, along with the decrepit cow and the cats that moved too slowly to escape. The smoke was like lethal gas, pinpricks to John’s eyes and claws in his throat. It rose like a tornado in reverse, ghostly fingers reaching for the purple and orange streaked sky.

  They decided to let the barn go—what could they do? Instead, they drowned Lillian’s writhing body in icy water from the pump. It took fourteen buckets before she grew still, smoldering at John’s feet.

  She tried to scream, but her lips had been fused by the kiss of the flames. She was a blackened malformed shape of a woman. Her beautiful hair had gone to ash and her eyes were lidless, staring but unseeing.

  John never forgot the smell of her those last moments, that putrid stench of charred flesh. He had screamed for her, maybe because she could not, and sank to his knees at her side, wanting to hold her and knowing he could not. What pain might a simple caress bring?

  What she was, a Deathwalker, meant she would remain like that forever. Purgatory on earth—straddling the line between life and death.

  Devin had snatched up a shovel.

  “You don’t need to see this,” he told John as he raised it up in both hands.

  John had opened his mouth to speak. And for what? To plead with Devin to allow her to live, to remain indefinitely as she was? John had moved to Lillian on hands and knees and pressed his lips to her brittle and cracked cheek.

  “I’ll always love you,” he whispered. Then he had turned away, unable to look anymore.

  He had heard the sick, dull thunk as Devin brought the shovel down and removed her head, because that was the only way to kill a Deathwalker. There was only a little blood, but still the smell of it was like old copper pots. John had buried his f
ace in the cold, damp grass and wailed into the ground, oblivious to the agonized brays of the cow as it cooked alive inside the flaming skeleton of the old barn.

  He remembered how he had begged Devin to kill him after that, but Devin only held him and wept silently against John’s shoulder.

  John had never seen Kasper, but he knew. Bloody fucking coward, slinking in the darkness like a rat. Over the course of their years pursuing and being pursued, he had realized that Kasper had been changed, as well. The embrace of bloodlust was now his.

  It was cannibalistic.

  He worried that Susan would suffer the same fate as Lillian, or worse. He had heard the talk of the modified shotgun Kasper used to “retire” Deathwalkers, how it removed the head in a rain of blood and brains, leaving nothing above the shoulders. The thought of Susan meeting up with that maniac sickened him because he already loved her.

  Devin had not been able to save Lillian. What would make Susan any different?

  chapter thirty-six

  It began to sleet as Devin and Susan crossed the broken parking area of the old amusement park. The hulking wooden coaster sat in the darkness like a mammoth snake, or perhaps a prehistoric creature, coiled, waiting. Without the garish lights marking the spokes neon green and pink, the Ferris wheel sat bleak and dead.

  Just as on every night, the hunger hit Susan like a punch in the gut. Her nerves ached, seeming to reach for the surface of her skin. Her awareness was far too keen. Her brain throbbed inside her skull. The inside of her mouth tasted like sand.