by Becket
“Gnocchi with white sauce and pine nuts.”
It was the most amazing food I’d ever had.
He kissed me after dinner. He put his tongue in my mouth. The feeling was exciting and strange. It was my first kiss. I didn’t know what to say afterward. I asked him if I’d bitten his tongue. He didn’t ask me out again.
I didn’t mind. We stayed friends.
They say you always remember your first kiss. Mostly I remember the taste of meatballs and marinara. It’s good enough.
A girl asked me out next. She was naturally blonde, but she dyed blue streaks through her hair. They matched her blue eyes, but she wore black contact lenses. She looked like a china doll.
She was an amazing violinist, too. And I always thought of her as gravity since everyone was drawn to her personality. But my china doll was more fragile than I realized.
Our date was mostly walking and talking throughout the streets of Idyllville. We walked to the local grade school and sat on the swings in the playground. We were like little kids again.
She told me about her life. I listened. She liked that. Maybe no one had ever listened to her before.
She kissed me. She tasted as sweet as strawberries.
The next day she asked me out for another date.
My china doll has long graduated by now. She’s giving outrageously expensive private violin lessons to children of upper class families in Beverly Hills. She always gets good results. She did from me.
I visited her last month. She won’t remember my visit. That’s always the case when you’re pierced by a Blood Vivicanti. You’ll never remember my tongue driving deep into your neck. You won’t remember my venom seeping into your flesh. You won’t remember your blood pouring into my mouth.
What will you remember?
Only the best night of your life.
That’s what my china doll had last month, when I drank her blood and ate her memories.
It’s strange with her Blood Memories in me today. From her point of view, I can remember our first date. I’d thought I was so clumsy with her, but she hadn’t even been thinking about me.
Her Blood Memories have made me a great violinist. I’ve taken up playing Bach’s Chaconne for Solo Violin.
Incidentally, the man who made us, Wyn, his late wife Aemilia loved that piece. I’ve only met her through Wyn’s Blood Memories. Through them I’ve learned that Lowen the Dark Man killed Aemilia rather ruthlessly. Afterward, Wyn harbored an obsessive hate for Lowen. It was through that hate and through Aemilia’s death that the Blood Vivicanti were born.
Life is rife with our interconnectivity, too.
My china doll was like most boys her age – her inner life was more centripetal than centrifugal. But that didn’t matter much to me while we were dating. I didn’t have enough distance from her to know that things could get better.
Besides, I liked the taste of strawberries. Still do.
I’m toying with the idea of piercing her again, not because I need more of her blood or Blood Memories. I just like being inside her and her in me.
My peers at the Academy acted the way I wanted to act. I imitated how they were so that I could stop being who I was. Originality didn’t matter to me. Being understood was a better rush.
I was learning the difference between people who hear you and people who listen to you, and I was discovering that I liked the second kind. I was also learning how to be fluent in the language of music while simultaneously learning the language of interpersonal communication. Both took a lot of listening – although sometimes that interpersonal stuff sounded a lot like monkeys screeching in a zoo.
For the first time in my life, I wasn’t looking forward to the end of the school year. For the first time, school was enjoyable.
My slouching stopped. I started to think about how others viewed me. And I started wearing makeup.
Some friends had to teach me how to coordinate the colors on my cheeks and eyes and lips. – Yes, I had friends now!
I was raising my hand in classes. I was offering answers. Mine were never wrong. Sometimes I accessed too much data in my mind, and I gave too much information to answer a question. Teachers and friends would look at me questioningly then. They might not have understood my response. But they didn’t misunderstand me. They never called me “weird.”
We were all weird. We understood each other.
I was still going off by myself, still sitting alone under a tree, still reading, still remembering, because no matter how many friends I’d made, I still needed time alone. Being around people emptied me. Being alone filled me.
I started working at Cool Beans Coffee Shop to earn money. I wanted to do something I’d never done before: Buy things. I’d never had money before. I’d never bought anything for myself before.
I spent my first paycheck on clothes. My old clothes were the shattered eggshells of an old me.
But, as is the case with life, right when things could not get any better, my whole world got turned upside down.
I was turned into a Blood Vivicanti.
It was either that or death.
It happened one night after work.
I was supposed to walk back to the Academy of the Arts.
Part of me didn’t want to return. It was cult classic night in my dorm. I wasn’t in the mood for popcorn and giggles and Shaun of the Dead, which was strange since Simon Pegg ≈ sigh.
So I decided to stroll alone through the neighborhoods of Idyllville. The village lacks any city planning. Houses have cropped up wherever it seems convenient, each is utterly unique, each is like a doll’s house. The roads are hilly and full of twists and turns, and some are actually paved.
That night it was winter. The sky had darkened. Snow hadn’t fallen yet. The air was frosty. I was bundled up in heavy clothes that I had bought from local shops.
I was listening to music in my head. I don’t have to listen to music through portable media players. I am my own portable media player – iVivicanti. My photographic memory easily recalls every song I’ve ever heard. My mind controls the volume.
As I strolled, I recalled the music to Mozart’s Dies Irae. My mind raised it to full volume. I love that work – Dies Irae! Dies Illa! – “Day of wrath! Day of woe!”
Suddenly two men materialized from the shadows.
I assumed they were from the next village since men often came over to Idyllville for the bar scene.
They were burly and twice as tall as me. They stood before me without speaking. They had thick beards, large paunches, and pluming from them was the stench of beer and cigarettes and something else that I could not name.
I had never smelled the stench of death before.
I assumed that they were ordinary men because I had never encountered anything like aliens or zombies or mad scientists who can turn people into Blood Vivicanti.
These two men weren’t zombies, no, not exactly. Lowen the Dark Man had made them in the same way he had made Nell – by tearing them apart inwardly, ripping their spirits or souls from them, like Peter Pan losing his shadow.
Lowen called these zombified creatures his Sleeper Devils.
I ran into the woods.
Lowen’s two Sleeper Devils chased me.
I’d never had to run before. I’d never been chased before. I didn’t like it. I wasn’t good at it.
The Sleeper Devils almost caught me a few times.
I didn’t know the forest very well and so I ran out of the woods right at the edge of a cliff. Thankfully I managed to stop myself before I fell off, balancing on the edge like some broken bird.
Moonlight shone on the jagged little rocks on the bottom of the cliff. It was a very far drop.
The Sleeper Devils clambered out of the woods, panting and wheezing and coughing. They weren’t used to running either, it seemed. One stood doubled over with his hands on his knees. The other was hugging a tree. Then they came toward me, slowly, prowling.
The thought of jumping off the cliff
was tempting.
In childhood, I used to anthropomorphize Death. I used to picture the event as a him, some Grim Reaper from a fairy tale, with glowing red eyes, flowing black cloak, sharpened scythe, and skeletal hands and fingers.
In my early teens, the Grim Reaper seemed as real as Santa Claus. It was a time of life when I had assumed I would die as alone as Ophelia. I had had no fear of death then, although dying worried me a little.
You can imagine my surprise when Death saved me from these two Sleeper Devils.
Death was a third man who came out of the woods. He was strolling leisurely, appearing right behind the other men. They didn’t see him. Yes, he was Death. And his name was Wyn.
Death’s black cloak was actually a $10,000 suit. He stood over six feet tall. He didn’t look much older than forty. His black hair was slicked back. He had a neat clean-shaven face with a strong chin. He had a boyish grin. His dark eyes twinkled.
The confidence and power exuding from Wyn’s mien and gait had never before seemed so perfectly commingled in any human being. But then again, he wasn’t a human being at all. He was a Blood Vivicanti. He was the first of us.
He made us. He was the father of a new breed of blood drinkers.
Wyn had no fear of the Sleeper Devils. He gripped their necks and lifted them off the ground. They looked weightless in his hands. He squeezed and easily snapped their necks. The sound seemed as innocent as two twigs snapping in the woods.
The whole time, Wyn never lost his boyish grin. His eyes never lost that magic twinkle. He never stopped staring at me either as he tossed the Sleeper Devils behind him like ugly ragdolls. The sound of them falling in the woods was faint. It had been a very far throw.
I gasped at Wyn and thought: Him. I want to be like him.
Just then the edge of the cliff broke away.
I lost my footing.
I fell off.
The fall from the cliff was quieter than I would have guessed. The only sound was air rushing in my ears – it sounded like a fine windy day. Falling to my death seemed so peaceful.
Blood Vivicanti are much faster than humans, and Wyn has always been very fast. But he wasn’t fast enough to catch me.
I hit the ground. The sound was horrible.
The pain didn’t feel real. Naturally my mind categorized it. The impact would be something to think about later.
But I couldn’t breathe. And I couldn’t move.
I started recalling the notes of the Confutatis of Mozart’s Requiem. I could hear the melody in my mind – Confutatis maledictis, flammis acribus addictis, voca me cum benedictus – “When the damned are silenced, doomed to acrid flames, you, God, will call me with the blessed.”
But my heart was beating with a strange rhythm. It was slowing. The melody and the rhyme fell apart.
The whole world seemed very confusing now.
My body was getting colder. I scolded myself for wasting my money on those warm clothes.
The stars had been bright. Now they were dimming.
Wyn leaped down from the cliff and landed on both feet beside me.
He knelt over me and leaned close to my face. He peered into my eyes. His boyish grin was gone and I wished it would come back. He had an expression of helplessness now, and that saddened me, since the absence of his boldness seemed to steal away his power.
But he was still very strong. He gathered me in his arms easily.
He spoke in a sonorous voice. “You’re going to be all right. Soon you’ll suffer no more pain.”
He opened his mouth. His tongue extended from between his teeth. And from the tip lengthened a point as small as a bee stinger.
Then it extended even longer.
He lifted my head. His tongue touched my neck. He ran the tip lightly over my flesh. His stinger punctured my skin. He stung me.
Blood ran out in rivulets. His tongue was so penetrating. A pop of air came from my throat.
The venom of the Blood Vivicanti now began seeping into every part of my body. My pain was diminishing. A magnificent sensation bloomed in my belly like a flower. My bones trembled. My muscles stretched.
Wyn drove his tongue deeper down. My body had been so cold. Warmth was now filling me up from within.
He drove deeper.
I gasped.
Deeper.
I think I said something like, “Oh my God!”
I imagined that we must have looked like some demented pietà. But I was mistaken: I looked more like Bernini’s Saint Teresa in Ecstasy.
Wyn pulled away.
He looked tenderly down at me, his mouth dripping with my blood.
“Welcome,” he said, “to the life of the Blood Vivicanti.”
CHAPTER THREE
To be continued
CHAPTER FOUR
Coming next header
I awoke from sleep to more confusion. I had no idea where I was. I was alert and afraid and worried. Questions swarmed like bees in my heart and head.
In a sense, it didn’t seem too different from any other day in the life of a teenage girl.
Suddenly I was aware of countless sights and smells and other sensations. It was a simultaneous attack on all my senses. Light and sound and pain happened all at once, like a lightning strike.
I sat bolt upright in a large bed, holding myself and I screamed, out of pain, out of fear.
Two other Blood Vivicanti were nearby. They heard me. They understood what I was going through. They let me scream.
Sometimes it’s good to let someone scream.
Slowly, the din of the world hushed into white noise and I released my ears. Slowly, my vision came into focus and I could now see much more than I ever saw before, much more than anyone could ever see with human eyes.
I was in a strange and beautiful room, like an enchanted chamber. My bed was king-sized, draped in a white canopy, covered in a cloud-like duvet, twelve pillows, each a different size. At the foot of the bed was a fireplace beneath a widescreen TV, both were roughly the same size, both were much larger than me. In a corner was a table and chairs shaped like twisting vines. Thick green curtains were drawn over a floor-to-ceiling window in a nook. And through a slight parting in the curtains silvery moonlight was spilling in across the floor.
Slowly I inhaled again.
The scent of the man who made me a Blood Vivicanti was everywhere. I was in his house. His name was Wyn.
I inhaled again. I realized more.
No, I wasn’t in his house. I was in his mansion. A great big mansion that seemed to go on forever, like a magic castle.
My clothes were gone. I was naked beneath the sheets. New clothes were laid out for me on the nearby table.
No one else was in the room.
I slipped from the bedclothes. The air was cold and fresh. Gave me goosebumps.
The luxury carpet was thick and soft. It felt good beneath my feet.
Folded neatly on the table were undergarments, a white t-shirt, a red V-neck sweater, and blue jeans. Snug shoes lay on the floor.
All my new clothes fit as though they had been tailored to my petite size.
The clothes had tiny rough filaments that only a Blood Vivicanti can feel. They scratched my skin, satisfying places I never knew had been itching for years.
My clothes smelled of fresh laundry. I love that scent too.
Yet their aroma was also the scent of direction. I could tell where they’d come from, how they’d been handled, the kind of people who’d touched them.
I opened my chamber door. I peeped through the crack.
The hallway was more ornate than my room. Empty too.
I crept from my room into the hallway. Like my room it too was carpeted in luxury. The hallway was lined with various chairs from various periods in history. French Revolution, Industrial Revolution, Computer Revolution.
On both sides of the hallway, soft cream-colored lights hung in sconces. On one side were marble statues of Christian saints and Greek gods. On the other side were su
its of shiny armor standing in chivalrous formation. Small tables between them had flower heads floating in bowls of water. Computer panels were imbedded into the walls near doors that led into other rooms. All the other rooms were empty.
I had this wing all to myself.
I could smell Earl Gray tea steeping in a kitchen. The kitchen was a few stories below me.
At the end of the hallway was the master stairwell. It was white marble. Down the middle ran a long black rug.
My body moved nimbly now. My footfall hardly made a sound going down each step. I didn’t have to tiptoe, but I did anyway. I didn’t feel safe yet, like a cat left to her own devices. I was acting the way I once did in grade school: I was trying to go unnoticed.
Life had taught me thus far to avoid looking at my own power. So at that time I couldn’t see how powerful I’d become.
I could have slammed my foot down and shaken the stairwell with the force of an earthquake. Perhaps even shattered it to shards.
I must be careful how I walk.
The stairs ended in the main foyer. It was as ornate as the upper floors. It was as large as an ordinary house. The floor tile was a black and white checkerboard pattern. The walls had bright white wainscoting. The wallpaper above was rich red cloth. Along the walls were matching red sofas with ebony frames. A grandfather clock stood beside one sofa, ticking and tocking. A round marble table was in the center. On it stood an immense spray of sweet smelling orchids. The delicious scent made my head spin.
