"You make it sound so… terrible."
“It cannot be true,” I whimpered.
“It is,” Wesley replied, “but it’s not so bad, in the end.”
“You took the only thing, the only pure thing left in your life, Wesley, and tainted it with... with this curse. Why? Why could you not have let me be?"
"I was lonely," he stood. His lanky legs began trotting toward the crumbling castle.
"Lonely?" I called out. “Lonely!”
"You will understand in time,” he mumbled. “You will crave companionship as the centuries wear on. You will need humanity, to be like them again. This need will make you take desperate measures, as I have done by making you."
"Wesley, you should have left me alone. That life – my life! – it was peaceful. It had purpose. Where will my soul go now?" Unable to sustain my tears, I allowed one to roll gingerly down my cheek.
"Your soul," he began, "that is between you and your god."
Silence fell as we stood atop the hill looking over the convent below. My soul wept for my former life. It had been naïve of me to think I was impervious to harm behind those hallowed walls. Since the first moment I stepped through the enclosure gates, I felt safe. The wild heather invited me in with its pleasing scent, and the sun - safely warming my cheek - welcomed me home.
Now, I knew I had never been safe. Not from the evil this world bred in its dark underbelly, and especially not from him.
"In time you will forgive me, Bree," he said, the silence breaking between us.
"Perhaps in time, but for now I cannot imagine that time coming."
He gazed out, eyeing the convent. “I remember you once asking for forgiveness and it was freely given.”
“Wesley, that was different. I was a child.” My shoulder touched his arms as we stood side by side. He grabbed my arm, calming my wavering body. Dizziness jellied my legs and blurred my eyes.
“Slow your pace,” he said. “You’re faster now. Your steps are effortless.”
“It sickens me,” I whispered, “this uneasiness; the unceasing buzz in my head.”
“It will ease after you’ve fed.” My nature – the monster within – understood his words, yet I did not.
My hand clutched his, its iciness now lessened by my own unnatural coldness. “I was sick then, too. I was dying.”
“I don’t enjoy thinking of that day,” he said. His fingers intertwined with mine.
“I know,” I admitted, my eyes meeting his. “But you forgave me. I didn’t think you would.”
“Bree, I watched your body wretch upon the bed with that fever. Your brow was covered in sweat and your eyes were blood shot.” He released my hand and wrapped his arm around my shoulder, pulling me into him. “I would have traveled to Hades and back to heal you.”
“But I should never have asked you to abandon Rosslyn.
“It was my decision,” he said, releasing me. “I chose to stay, to break off the engagement.” He stood and walked to the ledge’s edge. “Leaving you for dead,” he began, “Bree, I could have never forgiven myself.”
“But you stayed,” I said, my words a knife stabbing my back, “and then I left you for dead.”
“And I forgave you,” he said. “After all, I was the one who commanded you to leave.”
“If I had not asked you to stay, you would not be the monster before me, Wesley.”
“We cannot erase what has been done,” he said. “Speculating on past events is a futile exercise.” He sat, letting his gangly legs dangle over the ledge. “You have forever ahead of you and I do not suggest you put yourself through that anguish.”
With this, I left him. My feet descended the hill and followed the winding path that led to the convent. Candlelight still graced the spacious rooms. The closer I approached, the more I began seeing and hearing comfortingly familiar shapes and sounds.
The sisters gathered in the main chapel for evening prayer, singing "Agnus Dei." There was Mother Abbess at the lectern, her shrill voice as high as her upturned chin. There was Mary Elizabeth sitting in my usual spot in the front pew. She tightly clasped a handkerchief and rosary in her gnarled, aged hands. Everyone had a handkerchief and bloodshot eyes as I glanced about the room.
Sister Veronica, my closest companion, was not there. An unquenchable misery filled her heart when she learned of my absence. She knew what the others did not. She understood I would not return; that whatever lulled me away was more powerful than what they offered.
She was the one person I thought I could never live without, and now I had to. Her vacant spot – fourth row toward the back – reminded me, again, of what this curse had already cost me. We had been friends since childhood, entering the convent when the Black Death annihilated our families.
Some girls our age sought solace and education within the convents hallowed walls. They waited for the plague’s end, for the return of wealthy men willing. We knew this future no longer belonged to us.
Veronica was in her chambers, her head sunk into the straw mattress. She had long since succumbed to the deep sleep that comes with grief. So I watched in silence as the others said the Rosary. I wanted to speak, to call out – to scream – but found my voice mute.
"I watched you do that last night," he said approaching from behind. “You sat with them, singing, praying. I thought I was seeing a ghost before me.”
"I wish I could say good-bye to them. Look how distraught they are. I cannot even imagine where they think I have gone to, Wesley."
"Your Mother Abbess," he said, pointing to her, "she thinks you escaped in the middle of the night, afraid to take your solemn profession. And that one," he pointed to Mary Sr. Anne, a portly postulant newly come to the convent from a prominent French family, “she thinks you have run off with a secret lover.”
"Stop, please," I demanded. "I do not know how you are doing this, but I do not want to hear anymore. It is bringing me nothing but pain."
"Listen to them, Bree," he said.
I could hear their rhythmic and melodic chanting filling my ears, but nothing else.
"Focus on one of them, try to single out what that person is saying, then stop listening to their words."
I focused on Mary Katherine, a thin woman, mid-twenties. The sight before my eyes was a shame to see. She had been of noble family, but she came to the convent when her betrothed perished of plague. On that night, her weak frame crumbled in the pew. She squirmed on the cherry-wood bench, and her pew mates struggled to calm her. Mary Katherine bit at her nails and sobbed heavily all through her prayers.
As I watched her, I heard her. Not just her voice whispering “amen,” but her thoughts were cascading waves of emotion crashing into my mind. Lord, please just bring Mary Clare back. Please, God, please! I will give my life for her safety. This is torture, Lord. TORTURE! Lord, please, bring her back safely. Lord, hear my prayer!
Hearing that name – my sacred name – pained me. I wanted to flee from my brother’s side, to run back to the convent and embrace my sisters. Alas, though, I could not.
The hollow space Wesley’s curse created now ached. This was the first time I felt different. I realized, standing there watching her – listening to her thoughts – that I was no longer like her. Like them. Warm. Untouched. Mortal.
They would never find out what happened to me – it had to be.
I grew hungry watching them file from the chapel, heading to the dining hall. Bowls of barley soup and fresh baked bread sat before them on the stone tables. I could smell the spices, the pungent aroma of chicken stock emanating from the wooden bowls. None of it tempted the knot forming in my stomach.
Uneasiness strangled my throat, as the knot grew tighter.
"It hurts,” I told him. My hands clenched my stomach and I crouched to the cool earth.
"You need to feed. Those first hunger pains are the worst, Bree. I promise," he told me. He knelt down and placed a hand on my shoulder.
"It gets easier. Come, I will show you how
to feed." With this, he motioned for me to follow. I glimpsed the convent once more as I walked back up the cliff. Just once. Then I turned away and never looked back.
THREE
Feeding. The biting into living flesh, savoring the warm, metallic essence tickling his tongue – this was a sport for him. I detested the idea of partaking in such a vile practice. There had to be another way, I insisted. I had hoped. I could be a parasitic mosquito leaching Wesley’s leftovers, participating, but never fully playing his game. This could satisfy me. This could help maintain my innocence, or some pathetic mirage of what my innocence had been and would never again be.
However, this would not do. Wesley said the hunger would consume me. The animalistic need to succumb and devour would taunt me, bringing me to the brink of sanity, until I was helpless to submit. I would wander in bloodlust, and then having given in to temptation, having fed, would lose everything of my former self.
The scenario he painted slowly became reality. The hunger ate at my mind, ate away at my soul, leaving an abysmal craving that threatened to erase everything I had been and so dearly struggled to retain. I resigned to the temptation in an effort to avoid becoming a slave to my bloodlust, and to survive.
Had I known how the blood would make me feel, how the need for it would consume me, I would have fought the cravings with more earnest. Yet, I willingly bent to the vampiric will of this curse. I allowed it to pull me in, to call to me from the shadows, to lure me with its promise of nourishment.
One sip was all it took. One tiny, metallic drop falling gently onto my tongue and the animal inside, the animal growing from this curse, purred with delight.
With every drop, a hypnotic song played brightly in my ears. He had promised this ecstasy. He had known I would eventually be powerless to resist it. Just as he knew that once I tasted the blood, it would own me as it owned him.
I remember standing there watching the man I would later dispatch from this life. The craving distanced me from the act, and I saw this turning point as if watching a play unfolding before me. Locked inside, deep but still there, was my former self. She struggled with this. She argued. Yet, the blood controlled the body – the will.
As we stood there watching my prey, Wesley reassured me of what was to come. "You will become accustomed to it, I promise," he said. “And soon the drops will be ecstatic beads of joy sliding down your parched throat.” It was the bluntness of his words, how they stung with a truth the curse living inside identified, that widened the distance between my conscious and my hunger.
Caving to the bloodlust is what I feared. This animalist appetite for blood could drown the last remaining shards of humanity left, and I could not allow that to happen.
The man, a baker from the neighboring village, had supplied the convent with wheat the years our crop had poor yields. I knew him, his family, his daughters Rebecca and Hannah. He was an elegant man despite the time spent toiling in the field and the dirt caked beneath his thickened nails.
We watched as he read by the candlelight, and the memories I had of him bringing wheat to the convent, of his daughter’s gifts of bread for the orphans faded away. All I could hear was the rhythmic pounding of his heart. The smell of his blood – oh, the rich, buttery aroma – was a siren’s call.
It led me to his door, which opened effortlessly. Entering, I found him slumped in the chair, the book lying in his lap. His throat throbbed, the veins bulging and pulsating, singing to me.
“I cannot do this,” I told Wesley.
“You must,” he said. Wesley placed his hands on the man’s head and angled the neck for my access. The man’s plump artery quivered beneath his tanned flesh.
Disgust mingled with lust as I watched the artery pulsate. I could hear the blood rushing, a raging river waiting eagerly for me to drink.
“This first drink will be the hardest thing you will ever do,” he whispered, “but you must do it.”
He was wrong. There were harder things in my future. But without this blood, without this act of defilement, I would have no future. I had no choice.
Acting as his executioner, I pierced the man’s tender flesh with my newly formed fangs. The metallic blood gushed into my mouth - a warm fount of everlasting life. I savored every drop until his heart stopped, licking the last bits from my lips.
His blood was more than satisfying. The drops – each of them – shared with me his history, his feelings, his life. I realized, after having drained him of his essence, that we vampires needed this almost more than we needed the blood. The blood fed more than our bodies; it fed our loneliness.
Once it was finished, I looked about for Wesley. He came to stand near me and signaled for me to watch him. Carefully, he bit the tip of his index finger until it bled. With this, he smeared the liquid onto the bite marks, effectively erasing them. We left the man slumped as we had found him. Asleep… just now that sleep was eternal.
Wesley and I were together for four years. We hunted nightly, even though he no longer required it, and I learned from him everything I could. In that short span of time, really an insignificant hiccup to us, we traveled the vastness of Europe.
We held a residence in London, a rented estate near the Jewel Tower. Later, in Dublin, I would frequent Christ Church Cathedral in the hour right before dawn. My presence in the shadows fueled a rumor, a rumor that the angel of death haunted the chapel, waiting to collect sinful practitioners coming for morning vespers.
It was our year in Paris, though, that Wesley cherished. Near dawn, he would sit on the banks of the Seine and imagine how the water looked bathed in the nearing sunlight.
Being young in the blood, I still remembered the golden sky, afire with deep oranges and radiant reds. My favorite time of day, though, had been that moment just before the sun finally set in the evening sky. The crimson ribbons swirled with vanilla clouds, and plum and pink stripes weaved a symphony in the sky – a melody sung to a child at bedtime. This time of day seemed more magical to me than even the twinkling stars that replaced it.
There had been St. Petersburg, Berlin, Moscow, Madrid, and even a brief week in Rome. Each city was a new adventure. I was living a completely new life with him, with new eyes with which to view the world. We had the finest attire, made new in each city. Jewels from St. Petersburg, perfume from Paris, dresses from only the most delicate imported fabrics.
With time, I grew more accepting of my fate. As the vampiric powers seduced me, I further suppressed my former nature. I delighted in posing as an English duchess and he, a gallant duke; we made fools of entire cities. It was effortless to weave our spell over their innocent minds. This became a game, something to distract me from this horrid curse.
Eventually, the journey ended just as everything must end. Even eternity must have a final destination. I admit that I can no longer envision what this looks like.
Making me, Wesley had craved loved; he only found companionship. He desired more than a best friend or sister could provide. Year after year, I saw this in his eyes. He would watch women, talk with them, and then walk away. With time, he did this more often. He repressed the need to be with a lover, not a sister.
In Paris, there was a countess he spent nights with. He always came back just near dawn only to return to her night after night. The court grew suspicious of their activity and rumors grew. Once her father demanded a marriage proposal, we left Paris. Months passed after that before he was anywhere near his former, jubilant self, and I wondered why. I had no concept of love, or of loss. Having lived in the convent, I knew not of passion, of love, of being loved in return.
That was the first time I knew he needed more than I could give. He refused, though, to turn them. One after another, he would fall in love and then, in anguish, abandon his women.
It was the night before I left him when he finally told me why he always resisted.
After receiving the blood, Wesley had traveled only to find himself back in the city where we had grown up. Most of the people we h
ad known perished with the plague. The city, he said, was a changed entity. Commerce struggled, no longer flourishing as it once did, and many of the plague’s survivors were relocating to the larger cities.
The night before he left, he heard a familiar voice singing near the lake. It was there that he came upon Lady Abigail, his betrothed. She recognized him in the moonlight, called to him, and he took her as he had taken me. A week later, still in shock and unable to live with what she had become, Abigail lit her childhood home ablaze and threw herself into the fire. He vowed never to repeat that mistake.
The next night, I left him. Not out of hatred, for I have never held anything but the deepest love for my brother – despite the curse he has placed on me. No, this time I needed more. And although he denied himself of it, he did too.
With a note left on his writing desk and my belongings in bags and trunks on their way to a new country, I left as he hunted. I took with me the valuable lessons he had taught.
Surviving on little sips was acceptable. It was not necessary to kill your victim. And to keep my sanity, I lived by this. Change your name, your residence, and anything identifiable at the first hint of rumors. Holding too tightly to a place or a person can bring your destruction. And the one he most stressed, love from a distance.
Of all the things he taught me – to hunt, to survive – I would quickly forget the most important one.
FOUR
For that which has come, there is Urd
For that which is here, there is Verdandi
For that which will come, there is Skuld
Memories remained after the change. They were faded whispers, with images softened yet real. Memories invaded my mind when I least expected them to, when I began feeling more like the monster I now was.
The night I left, such memories slipped into my thoughts and veiled my eyes. My father, reclining on his favorite chair; his hand scratching over three-day whiskers; his eyes drifting, glazing over, lost and reminiscent.
Descent Into Madness Page 2
