The Innocents

by Riley LaShea

  “But some do, right?” she pressed. “Some drink more?”

  “Some do,” Haydn acknowledged. “Vice doesn’t die with one’s humanity. It’s a plight of us all, I’m afraid.”

  “You’re afraid?” Delaney laughed, feeling the minor weight of hypocrisy as she lifted her pint from the table. “Since it isn’t your blood, it would seem you have little to fear.”

  Silence falling again between them, Delaney took a drink, watching the steam from her plate sputter into patches as she set it down, knowing she couldn’t eat another bite. Not the first meal she’d lost to less than desirable information, unless she died in Haydn’s custody, it was also unlikely to be the last.

  “Have you ever seen a whale hunt?” Haydn asked, after staring at Delaney for what felt like hours.

  Thrown by the seemingly abrupt change in subject, Delaney was slow in getting out of her own head to respond. “No.”

  “It’s a gruesome tradition,” Haydn returned. “They surround the whales in boats, driving them into shallow waters. Then, they stab them with knives and spears, and hook them through their blowholes to pull them onto shore. It takes the whales several minutes to die. Blood pours into the water. So much of it, it turns the entire bay red. It runs down the beach. It truly is a horrific sight.”

  Narrative doing little to improve her mood, Delaney watched the server who was readying the room for the dinner crowd come to light the votive on their table. Glancing toward the window as he smiled, Delaney saw, with some relief, the sun was finally starting to sink. Which meant she would be back with Kiara and Vicar Bryce, and away from Haydn, soon enough.

  “Whales are intelligent creatures,” Haydn went on once the server departed, and Delaney resented having to hear the rest. “They care for their young. They communicate with each other telepathically. They mourn their dead. These hunts are harrowing experiences for them. Yet their slaughter is a huge tradition here, and those who take part see nothing wrong with the whales’ suffering.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better about the fact you drink human blood?” Delaney asked.

  “No.” Haydn’s voice was calm, reassuring almost, and Delaney resented that too. “Nothing is going to make you feel better about that. Nothing should. I just want you to recognize that how acceptable you feel it is for something to bleed is entirely dependent upon where you are on the food chain.”

  Booth dipping as Haydn shifted away from her, Delaney thought, for a moment, she actually had the gall to be insulted. Then, a sliver of light from the setting sun fell across the tabletop, hitting the spot where Haydn had been sitting a moment before.

  “How does it feel?” Nearly black eyes looking up from the shadowed side of the table, they held minor confusion. “The sun? How does it feel for you?”

  Those eyes growing more intense upon her, Delaney didn’t know why she didn’t fear them, why she couldn’t remember the monstrous fiend lurking behind them, even after all Haydn just told her.

  Leaning forward, Haydn slid the votive to Delaney’s side of the table, pulling back before her hand breached the path of the sun.

  “Put your hand to the flame,” she said, and, realizing she was now the one being challenged, Delaney pulled the slightly too-long sleeve of Haydn’s loaned shirt out of hazard’s way, hovering her palm above the candle and feeling its heat lick instantly at her skin.

  “Closer,” Haydn said, and, heart skipping with reluctance, Delaney dropped her hand marginally closer, swallowing against the increased discomfort.

  “Closer,” Haydn said again, and Delaney shifted her eyes from Haydn’s unflinching stare to the flame almost touching her palm. Moving nearer and nearer its flicker, the pain turned into piercing agony, the fire seeming to burn straight through her skin.

  “I can’t stand any closer.” She yanked her hand back, tears springing up.

  “That…” Haydn’s eyes were so concentrated on Delaney, they too burned. “Is how it feels.”

  Flame dancing higher between them, Delaney could still feel its ache on her palm, and she realized Haydn must have felt it all day, the merciless smolder of near combustion.

  Without complaint.

  Without reprieve.

  All to bring them simple comforts they didn’t really need.

  19

  It was easier for Haydn to see without the lights on inside the boat. Though she didn’t say anything, Delaney could tell, so she told her to leave them off. Riding blindly beside her, she tried to make herself as unobtrusive as possible, giving Haydn the option of forgetting her presence, so she, in turn, could do her best to ignore Haydn’s.

  “Why is there a working bathroom in the house?” Her attempt at demonstrating any type of disregard for Haydn proved as unsuccessful as it had all day. A million questions in her head, Delaney couldn’t even disregard Haydn as a source of information, apparently. Even if the information she’d uncovered earlier might have been best left buried. At least, while they were sleeping under the same roof.

  “Those things were already there,” Haydn said. “Humans inhabited the castle long before we did.”

  Response generating the automatic follow-up question of how the castle came into their possession, it occurred to Delaney she probably didn’t want to know.

  “What about the electricity?” she asked instead. “Some things are modern.”

  “There was a member of our clan.” Haydn’s voice growing strangely soft, Delaney had to lean in her seat to hear her above the hum of the motor. “Samuel. He was brilliant, curious about everything. Kind of like you. He enjoyed tinkering with things in the castle. He made a lot of upgrades to the fixtures, built a hydro-power system. He desalinated the water. Those things were of interest to him. So, I never really thanked him for it.”

  Not at all what she expected to hear - either of the existence of a deraph inventor or the regret that tinged Haydn’s voice - it pushed the less pertinent questions from Delaney’s mind.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died.”

  “The hunters?”

  “Yes,” Haydn said.

  “Did they kill him, or…?”

  “He died completely untouched, sitting in the library.” Haydn got what she was asking, and the answer made everything instantly more real. There was no reason for Haydn to lie about the danger. There was no reason for her to keep them as guests in her stately castle, to provide them with provisions, or even justification for what they had done.

  It was also difficult to accept, that there were actual predators in the world - people just like them - willing to kill them over an association they had no control over.

  “Are you invincible otherwise?” Delaney remembered the threat wasn’t just to them.

  “If you kill me, you’ll die too.”

  “I wasn’t planning to…” Delivery so deadpan, without visual reference, Delaney couldn’t tell Haydn was joking until she heard her soft laughter from across the cockpit. Stirring something warm and quixotic inside of her, she tried to shake both sensations before they could burrow too deep.

  This was their way, she had to remind herself as many times as it took. This was their power. They seduced just by being. Delaney just didn’t know deraphs knew how to joke. In the image she’d long held in her mind, they had always been these exquisite, brooding creatures, and, until that moment, Haydn had done little to contradict her original impression. “You just… you seem invincible. Are we your only weakness?”

  “I thought you knew about us,” Haydn replied.

  “There’s really not that much information about you,” Delaney admitted. Plenty of misinformation too. Popular vampire lore stemmed directly from deraph legend, and, over time, it had become little more than a compendium of stereotypes and fallacies. So much of it was so wrong, she had already discovered, that she had to wonder where all the falsehoods originated.

  “You’re not my only weakness,” Haydn said, and, eyes drifting shut, Delaney couldn’t dis
miss the intimate nature of the statement in the enclosed space. "Some hunters have found rather ingenious ways of trying to put an end to us directly.”

  It had to be difficult, though, Delaney knew, if not impossible. As fast as deraphs moved. As strong as deraphs were. As much pain as they could endure.

  “Do you really clot instantly?” All her suppressed curiosities reared back up.

  “Yes,” Haydn responded.

  “And your heart, it heals?”

  “Yes,” Haydn said. “But it can also be damaged beyond repair, and we can’t survive without it.”

  “What else?” Delaney asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What else should I know about you?” she posed, and when Haydn said nothing for several long seconds, Delaney thought she had been given a rather definitive answer.

  “What do you want to know?” When Haydn at last opened the door, Delaney barreled through it with all the wives tales and myths she had read and tried to translate into logic over the years before Haydn could slam it closed.

  “Well, obviously garlic doesn’t send you scurrying.”

  “So, your choice of meal endeavored to test,” Haydn returned, and, realizing her minor experiment hadn’t gone unnoticed, Delaney blushed freely in the darkness of the boat. “It does impede clotting, and it is a rather pungent odor. But I also try to stay away from pig sties, smoky bars, public restrooms.”

  “What about crosses?” Delaney asked. “Holy water?”

  “Objects have no effect on us,” Haydn said. “The blessings or curses placed upon them can, as they can upon anyone. I find people, in particular, have a way of calling things bad luck when they may well have been hexed.”

  “And obviously you can cross running water.” Boat skimming the water beneath them was testament to that.

  “Then, there are those rumors that were advantageous for us to start ourselves.” Delaney could hear the smile in Haydn’s voice, and it made perfect sense. Why wouldn’t the one place the deraphs chose to hide from the world be the one place the world believed they couldn’t possibly go?

  “What about…?” Realizing what she was about to ask, she shook her head in admonishment of her own free-flowing thoughts. The more fanciful of vampire legends already proven, for the most part, erroneous, she could think of no better way to sound like a complete and utter moron on the subject.

  “What?” Haydn questioned, and Delaney weighed her desire to know against her need for self-preservation.

  “Can you…” Apparently, self-preservation went by the wayside in the influence of her curiosity. “Can you fly?”

  Deep chuckle invading the boat, it might have been mortifying, if not for the rather pronounced distraction of it winding through Delaney to twist her insides.

  “Not like I used to,” Haydn responded. “After the sloughing of my wings, I had to learn to fly differently. We all did. Most of the time, it gets us out of harm’s way, but it still isn’t the sky.”

  “Are you screwing with me right now?” Delaney wasn’t sure why she had such a hard time believing it when she was the one who thought it a worthy enough question to ask.

  Small thump from Haydn’s side of the cockpit causing her to jump, Delaney didn’t recognize the noise in her blindness until she was jostled aside by her own arm rest being pushed out of the way as well.

  “Give me your hand,” Haydn requested.

  Knowing she didn’t have to, that Haydn could have found any part of her she wanted in the dark without permission if she so chose, Delaney reached out, breath idling in a dizzying way as Haydn’s fingers closed around her wrist to guide her arm across the space between them.

  Recognizing the smooth fabric of Haydn’s shirt only because she couldn’t mistake the contours of Haydn’s back beneath, her heart joined her lungs in the autonomic assault, pausing in its beats long enough to enhance the woozy sensation as Haydn situated her hand.

  “Go up a little,” Haydn husked as she let go, and the flush of raw, near primal longing was so forceful, Delaney felt like she was exaggerating it, even to herself.

  “Do you feel it?”

  Heart resuming double-time as her hand smoothed over warm fabric, Delaney’s fingers found the anomaly - a twisted knot just inside the curve of Haydn’s shoulder blade that felt like a bone wrenched out of place.

  “Yes.” The word was difficult to form.

  “Now, go down.”

  Hyperactive misfirings throughout her body proof it was the last thing she should do, Delaney’s hand skimmed the muscle in Haydn’s back anyway, assuming the succession of tics and twitches she felt were a product of Haydn’s natural defensive make-up. Able to see in absolute darkness, sensitive to smells, her sense of touch was bound to be equally heightened.

  “Keep going,” she said when Delaney reached the barrier of her waistband, and fingertips dipping inside the fitted fabric, they found bare skin before the second knot. “You can feel them on the other side too.”

  If Haydn was going to insist on being so accommodating, Delaney would be foolish to decline. Hand moving across Haydn’s back, it bumped over the same low knot, before sliding upward, at neither of their command, making no effort to relocate itself to the outside of Haydn’s shirt, and ending up trapped in the warm hollow between Haydn’s bare skin and the fabric that still retained the heat from her body.

  “What are they?” Certain the racing heartbeat beneath her palm had to be her own, Delaney knew Haydn must feel it, but she couldn’t caution, persuade, or force herself to draw her hand out.

  “Fulcrums.” Haydn’s shift closer facilitated Delaney’s exploration as her touch moved again across her upper back, finding the knot where she first began. “And pivots.”

  “Of actual wings?” Distracted as she was, Delaney’s cynicism was still present, and Haydn’s laugh a sensation, quivering against her hand, it felt more like discomfiture at the revelation than ridicule of the question.

  “Of actual wings,” Haydn said.

  Just as difficult to believe a second time, Delaney put a real face to the many images she’d seen, documented over thousands of years, from crude sketchings on cave walls to modern renderings on canvas. Black-winged demons sweeping through night skies over rural villages and urban landscapes. If Haydn had such wings, would she have literally swooped in to rescue her from Stacy’s gang? What kind of image would she have struck against the murkiness of the cave as she stood on the railing of her balcony in that instant before she dove into the sea?

  “Why did they shed?” Hand quivering against the suddenly blistering heat of Haydn’s skin, Delaney was astounded to discover her brain retained function.

  “Premonitory evolution, I assume,” Haydn said. “Manned balloons were in the air a few years later, and the next generation of deraphs never developed them. Once men took to the skies, it was no longer a safe place for us to be. The universe does have a way of predicting future events, and molding its design accordingly. We weren’t the only ones. The angels fell too.”

  There was nothing, of gods or men, that could make Delaney miss that nugget of information. Angels. Seraphim. Celestial beings turned beings bound to the Earth. Almost as much a mystery to man as the deraphs. Just more proof the world was littered with the unknown, and she would only ever know a small part of it.

  “So, you evolved during your lifetime?” she questioned.

  “Morphing, I believe they call it when it happens while you’re alive,” Haydn returned. “And if I live on for as long as I have already, I imagine I will again.”

  “And how long is that?”

  “A thousand years.”

  “A thousand years?” Delaney wasn’t sure why she kept being staggered by things she knew from the outset could be true. “You have lived for a thousand years?”

  “I know.” The response was momentarily perplexing. “I don’t look a day over eight hundred.”

  Stunning her most of all, it took Delaney a moment to break throug
h her stupor. Laugh little more than a nervous exhalation, she realized no answer Haydn provided could be nearly as revealing as that which she kept demonstrating herself to be, and had alluded that others of her kind were - a unique, complex being. Far cry from the single-minded sirens who wanted only to consume humans in one way or another that the majority of accounts depicted, Delaney found Haydn to be almost, sort of, in an extremely twisted way, human.

  “You said we’re connected.” She didn’t need any further proof of that. Fingertips vibrating against Haydn’s back, she could feel it, the buzz of energy, as if they were two components of an electrical circuit sparking into current. “What does that mean? How?”

  “When a deraph is sired…” Delaney could tell by the sound of Haydn’s voice - a little closer, a little quieter - that she was looking toward her. “Part of the mortal soul is stripped away.”

  “I thought you had no soul.”

  “Do I seem soulless to you?”

  Not exactly offended, the question wasn’t free of irritation either, and it occurred to Delaney she was rather tactless.

  “No,” she admitted. “That’s just what all the texts imply.”

  “I’m sure they do,” Haydn responded. “Humans don’t exactly understand the soul, do they? Tempered passions and raging fury, kindness and cruelty, love and lust, generosity and greed, peace and violence, the soul is all of these things. Strip away love, kindness, peace, and generosity, the rest still remains. What humans view as evil is nothing more than the purging of those parts of the soul they incorrectly believe make up the entirety of the soul in species never meant to be concerned with humanity’s well-being in the first place.”

  At the reminder of that which Haydn was, and lacked, and how little her concern could truly extend to them, the energy that arced beneath Delaney’s hand felt like treason against her species. Extracting it from where it had come to rest in the center of Haydn’s back as if it was laying claim there, she wished her shudder could be one of disgust, instead of the scarcely controlled longing to touch Haydn again.