Dark Hunger

by Reinke, Sara

  Tessa paused at the foot of the steps, looking up into darkness. She could hear Rene tromping around up there, but couldn’t see anything. “Rene? Whose house is this?”

  After a long moment, he looked over the railing and down at her, more shadow than distinguishable form. “It’s mine, pischouette. I told you. This is where I grew up.” He ducked out of her view again, walking away from the railing. “Look, just go sit in the car, will you? Before you get something on your little designer pants and then I never hear the end of it.”

  Her brows narrowed. Asshole, she thought. Fine. If that’s how he wants it, fine by me. I hope a rat comes up and bites you right in the ass, Rene Morin. You’ve got it coming, and I’m sure there are at least a couple of them running loose in here somewhere.

  She turned to go and heard a soft sound from the bathroom, a scrabbling in the loose plaster that gave her pause. The idea that a rat might actually be close at hand suddenly left her apprehensive, and she glanced hesitantly over her shoulder. Oh, God, don’t let it be a rat, she thought, as the scratching sound came again. I hate rats. Please don’t let it be a rat. Don’t let it—

  A man appeared in the bathroom doorway, a crooked figure nearly silhouetted by the backdrop of sunlight as he shambled into the corridor. Tessa shrank back in startled fright and he paused, squinting blearily at her.

  He was older, with gray, wiry hair that framed his face in a wild, disheveled halo and sprouted from his chin and cheeks in a matted, mangy beard. His clothes were filthy and threadbare.

  He was human. She could tell by the scent of his blood, discernable even over the stink of his body odor, his need for a bath. And that realization, coupled by her need to feed—which had suddenly, almost instantly swelled to near-desperate proportions—fueled her already stirring bloodlust. Her fangs dropped fully; Tessa felt the distinctive pop as her lower jaw snapped reflexively out of socket to accommodate her extended canines. As her pupils widened, spreading in circumference to fill the visible spaces between her eyelids, the shadow-draped interior of the house suddenly became bathed in light from all detectable sources. The bright spill of illumination from the bathroom became like a solar flare, and the jackhammering of the man’s heart as he recoiled in clumsy, floundering terror pounded in her ears.

  She didn’t remember leaping at him, knocking him backward and to the ground. She didn’t remember straddling him or burying her teeth into the side of his neck while he thrashed beneath her and cried out hoarsely. All she could think about was the blood. She tore his throat open with her mouth, plunging her canines into his carotid artery and gulping greedily, hungrily as his frantic heart sent blood coursing rhythmically into her mouth.

  She didn’t hear Rene shouting her name, hadn’t even realized that he’d come racing downstairs at the sounds of the man’s shrieks until she felt his hand close sharply, firmly against her elbow. Rene jerked her to her feet, hauling her away from the man. She fought him the entire way, kicking and scratching at him with her nails, screaming and cursing as she struggled to return to her feeding. Rene grasped her by the arms, whipped her around and shook her soundly. “Tessa, goddamn it!”

  The sharpness of his voice startled her instantly out of the reverie of the bloodlust, and she fell still, hiccuping for breath and shuddering.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Rene yelled, giving her another solid shake before turning her loose. He forked his fingers through his disheveled, shoulder-length hair, shoving it out of his face and all the while staring at her as if she’d lost her mind.

  “I…I couldn’t help it…” she whimpered. She could still taste blood in her mouth. It was smeared all over her face and neck; a glance down revealed the front of her white linen blouse stained scarlet with it.

  Rene walked over to the derelict. The man lay in a crumpled heap against the floor. She could hear him gargling softly for strained breath; she’d punctured his windpipe in her overzealous effort to feed. She’d also swallowed enough blood to leave him hovering on the brink of death. After a few, sodden, struggling breaths, the man fell still and silent. Rene pressed his fingertips against the side of his neck, then glanced at her as he stood again. “He’s dead.”

  Rene could feed without killing, a concept as alien to Tessa as trying to eat a cheeseburger with her feet. The reason her twin, Brandon, had fled the Brethren was because he hadn’t wanted to kill; he’d abandoned his bloodletting, the ritual of the first kill, rather than give in to his bloodlust. He’d learned from Rene how to feed without killing, but he’d never fed before then. Tessa had, plenty of times in the last three years. She hadn’t meant to kill the old man, hadn’t been acting out of any malicious intent. She’d simply been doing what came naturally to her. And Rene clearly didn’t approve.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. And then she remembered—to her horror. Oh, God, Rene’s family is half human! What if someone did live here? Oh, my God, what if I just killed someone in his family? “Who…who is he?”

  Rene’s sharp brows crimped together, draping his brown eyes in heavy, menacing shadows. “How the hell should I know? That’s hardly the point.” The thin line of his mouth turned down; the hard angle of his jaw was tense and rigid. He closed his hands—smeared now with the old man’s blood—into fists and marched past her. “Viens m’enculer!”

  “I said I’m sorry!” She hurried to follow him, but one of the floorboards in the hallway snapped beneath her, sending her sprawling to the floor. She landed hard on her knees, scraping them raw, and abrading her palms.

  “Goddamn it!” she cried. Her foot had fallen into a deep recess beneath the floorboard, and the rough edges of broken wood had cut open her ankle. She winced as she eased her foot loose, then frowned as dim light reflected off something in the hole.

  She scooted toward the narrow opening and looked more closely. Reaching inside, she felt something thick and leathery against her fingertips; the spine of a book. She frowned, trying to get a grip on it and pull it free, but the hole didn’t grant enough room. Tessa grabbed the next floor plank in her hands and jerked against it, pulling until the old, weather-beaten wood gave way and snapped loose. Again and again, she yanked away floorboards until she’d cleared away a wide enough opening through which to remove the book.

  It was huge, thick and cumbersome, and her first thought was that it was some kind of scrapbook. It wasn’t until she turned back the heavy cover and flipped carefully through the brittle, yellowing pages that it occurred to her what the book might really be.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered, wiping her hands against her pant legs so she didn’t get blood all over the parchment.

  The book appeared to be written in French, words set to the page by hand in ink, but it was some sort of dialect she’d never seen before. The light was too dim, the handwriting too small for her to make out the text clearly, but as she thumbed ahead, she saw pages outlined with lined diagrams through the last quarter or so of the thick volume. Family trees, she thought. Or at least, one family tree.

  She recognized some of the names transcribed on the diagrams: Davenant, Trevilian, Morin.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered again, so stunned she forgot about the man she’d just bled to death, or the fury she’d seen in Rene’s face. Oh, God, this is Rene’s family tree—his Brethren side of the family. This book is one of the Tomes! Holy shit, it’s one of the clan Tomes!

  The Tomes were a series of books maintained by each of the four Brethren clans, the Nobles, the Davenants, the Trevilians and the Giscards. These books not only chronicled the history of the Brethren race, they were used to meticulously track and plan each family’s line-age. Marriages were arranged by the Brethren Elders like Tessa’s grandfather after careful consultation of the Tomes in order to prevent inbreeding between particular families and to keep the bloodlines clean. Only the Elders were allowed to see the Tomes; the books were kept under tight lock and key and used only behind closed doors, away from any possible prying eyes.

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nbsp; Until now. Tessa stumbled to her feet, hefting the book against her chest. Her ankle smarted as she settled her weight on it, but she gritted her teeth and limped to the front door.

  “Rene!” she called as she staggered back outside into the oppressive heat, the blinding sunlight. Rene had returned to the car, popped the trunk and fished out a fresh shirt from an oversized duffel bag. He’d also pulled out a bottle of water.

  “Rene, look,” she grunted. “Look what I found inside. It’s—”

  “Clean yourself up.” Rene tossed the bottle of water at her, and she yelped, loosening her grip on the book reflexively. It dropped to the ground and the bottle fell beside it, landing heavily in the weeds.

  “Be careful!” she exclaimed, snatching the Tome back in hand. “Do you know what this is?”

  “No,” he replied, striding toward her. He grabbed the book and jerked it away from her, tossing it unceremoniously into the backseat of the car. “And frankly, my dear, I don’t give a flying fuck.”

  Something had fallen out of the book, a postcard or photograph that had fluttered to the ground by the Audi’s back tire. Rene leaned over, picking it up. Whatever it was, he stared at it for a long moment, his expression growing momentarily stricken.

  “Rene?” she asked. At the sound of her voice, his face hardened again, and he shoved the slip into the back pocket of his jeans.

  “I said clean yourself up.” His voice sounded strange, suddenly strained somehow, but his brows remained furrowed, his mouth set in a frown. “Take off that goddamn shirt and throw it into the trees over there. You just murdered someone, and I’d just as soon get on the road again before I’m tempted to try it, too.”

  He said this with a pointed look that left no doubt the person he might feel inclined to murder was her. His disgust and aggravation were so apparent, it left her abashed and ashamed. Her shoulders hunched, her eyes burning with the sting of tears. Her bottom lip quivered and she sniffled as she opened the water and splashed it on her face and hands. “You’re an asshole.”

  Rene leaned his hip against the rear bumper of the car, folded his arms across his chest and deliberately turned to present his back to her as she unbuttoned her blouse. She shrugged her way out of the blood-soaked linen, letting it drop to the grass at her feet, then pulled the faded gray T-shirt Rene had given her over her head.

  “Get in the car,” Rene growled after she’d tossed her blouse into the heavy underbrush as he’d ordered.

  Still sniffling, Tessa obeyed, sitting against the pale leather front seat with her shoulders hunched, her fingers knotted in her lap. They sat there in silence for a long moment, him in the driver’s seat drumming his fingers against the wheel, and her beside him.

  “If you ever do that again, I’ll leave your ass behind,” Rene told her finally, his voice low and clipped, as if he struggled to sound calm. “You understand me, pischouette? You can’t just run around killing people. That guy was at least somebody’s son, and who knows what else—someone’s father, their grandfather.” He spared her a glare. “He was something to somebody somewhere and you killed him.”

  At this, his snide tone and his sharp words, as if she was a naughty child in need of remonstration, something in Tessa snapped. It reminded her too vividly of her life in the Davenant house with Martin.

  “I told you I was sorry!” she exclaimed. “What else do you want from me? I couldn’t help it. Maybe you and Brandon don’t have to bleed someone dry to feed, but I—”

  “Who told you to wait so goddamn long between feedings that you had to go and rip that poor son of a bitch’s throat open?” he snapped back. “I asked you before we left the city, ‘do you need to feed?’ I asked you again before we took off out of New Orleans, and both times, you told me no.”

  “Because you wanted me to feed off hookers! Maybe that’s good enough for you, Rene, but I’m sorry. I’m not about to pay some bleach-blond whore to—”

  “Oh, no.” He barked out a short, mean laugh. “You’ll save yourself for some strung out bum stinking of his own goddamn waste, too drunk to even stick up to you in a fight.” He spared her a glance, his brow arched. “Or maybe next time, you’ll find some migrant worker who doesn’t speak a lick of English, just like down on the farm. You take your food there Mexican, no?”

  She smacked him, the report of her hand striking his cheek loud and sharp in the heavy morning air. She hit him hard enough to whip his face to the side, and he turned back to her slowly, his brow still arched as he pressed his fingertips against the point of impact.

  “You have no right to judge me,” she seethed at him, trembling angrily, her voice choked with tears again.

  He continued looking at her for a long moment, seeming simultaneously amused by her slap and irritated by it. “Maybe so,” he said. “Maybe no.”

  That had been earlier that day. They’d spent the rest of the afternoon on the road, neither speaking to the other. When they’d stopped for the night at the chain motel with its nondescript suite that smelled faintly of stale cigarette smoke to Tessa’s keen nose—despite the NO SMOKING sign on the door—she’d planned to call Brandon, to beg him to come and get her. But then she’d sat down on the bed and began to study the Tome she’d found—which she’d snatched out of the backseat of the car before Rene could lay a finger on it—and remembered the day years earlier when she and Brandon had discovered the ruins of the old great house.

  Rene’s name, Morin, didn’t belong to any of the existing Brethren clans, which had led Tessa and Brandon to believe he was part of a separate sect, or perhaps a family that had splintered from the Brethren. But Tessa had seen another Morin family tree, this one much shorter than the one presented in the Tome, which Rene’s human grandmother had put together for him, and through this, she’d clearly seen that the Morins and the Brethren clans had once been affiliated. One of Rene’s ancestors had married into the Davenant clan.

  What if the Morins had once been part of the Brethren? she wondered.

  In addition to the clan names she recognized, there were others still that were unfamiliar to her—some French, like Durand and Lambert and others with origins not so apparent—Ellinger, Averay.

  Were all of these clans, too? she thought in amazement. My God, at some point could there have been so many? What happened to them? What if that great house Brandon and I found had belonged to one of them? What if they never rebuilt it, like they did the others, because they left somehow?

  But why?

  The first portion of the book consisted of old, brittle parchment pages that appeared to Tessa’s untrained eye to have been carefully removed from another, probably older volume, and bound into the Tome. The pages were intricately adorned with hand-painted borders to resemble climbing vines, tree limbs and other decorations. The text wrapped around large, colorful paintings depicting all sorts of imagery—groups of men gathered together around a large table, as if in conference; farming scenes that appeared to depict different crop harvests; people playing musical instruments or dancing; people traveling by horseback to what looked like castles and closely nestled villages or men in armor on white horses jousting or sword fighting.

  Many of the illustrations showed darker images—men and women lying in bed, their bodies covered in boils or sores; others lying naked and strewn on the ground while behind them houses burned and a skeleton rode an emaciated black horse, a scythe slung across its bony shoulder. Several depicted another manner of monster, this one naked, hunch-backed and hairless, with bulging eyes, a mouth ringed with long, sharp teeth, and long, spindly fingers hooked with claws. Abominacion was transcribed beneath it, and Tessa didn’t need to be a medieval linguist to understand.

  “Abomination,” she’d whispered, shivering as she thought of the stories her brother Caine had always told about the Abomination living beneath the great house in the depths of the Beneath.

  Upon closer examination of the text, it appeared to be written, at least at first, in a strange mix of French a
nd Latin she couldn’t decipher. She’d been fighting mounting fatigue, propped up in bed with pillows, skimming through the book when she’d dozed off. The sound of Rene’s cell phone, set to speaker mode and turned up loudly as he rang someone’s line, had roused her. The phone kept ringing and ringing until finally, irritably, she’d shoved the book aside and stumbled out of bed with every intention of flinging the door wide and screaming at him to hang up already, goddamn it. She stopped, her hand on the doorknob, when she heard a woman’s voice—tinged with sleepiness—finally answer.

  Who is he calling?

  Tessa had opened the door slowly, quietly, cracking it a brief margin and peering into the living room and beyond. She had seen Rene on the couch with a mostly empty bottle of whiskey on the table in front of him. He’d gone out earlier after they’d checked into the room, and now she knew why. He’d been buying booze.

  He’s drunk. Terrific. Just what I need, she’d thought, tempted yet again to call Brandon and Lina and ask if they had room in their car for her.

  “Hello?” the woman on the phone said again.

  Rene had pulled the tails of his shirt loose from his jeans and sat with it unbuttoned so it lay open, revealing his chest. Even from her vantage, Tessa could see he was hard-cut with muscles, his stomach chiseled above his waistband.

  He wasn’t an unattractive man; quite the opposite, in fact—and that was probably the most aggravating thing about him. He’d told her once he was in his fifties, but he looked only in his late twenties or early thirties. Damn near perfect when it came to physique, he had broad shoulders, a slim waist, long legs and strong arms. With caramel-brown eyes, sharp brows, high cheeks and angular features, Rene was handsome in a rugged, if not somewhat disheveled sort of way. He seemed content to let a day or two—or even three—lapse in between shaving, and his idea of styling his dark, sandy blond hair appeared to be simply running his fingers through it and letting the wind take care of the rest—a far cry from the men of the Brethren.