by Various
“I’m of a different ilk than my offspring,” she explained, her revelation ominous.
With each taste, I felt her soul rooting into mine.
Her memories flooded me. Her hold pushed past my defenses. I failed. I fell. I could not stop when she discarded my will and shoved me full force into the old mausoleum. It reeked of rotting flesh. She cackled and shoved me a second time through the second doorway to where the coffin awaited. I feared she’d place me in there and somehow lock me in that dark, gruesome prison, but she did not. Karada stood in the doorway, her fanged smile vicious as she regarded me.
“What do you want from me?” I asked. “I’ve done nothing to harm you.”
“You freed me. For that, I’ll let you live.” She walked out and slammed the door. Locks clicked. Another sound grated, stone over stone. Dust filtered beneath the wooden door. I swallowed the last of her essence, afraid.
“Karada!”
“Do not call for me unless you’re ready to be mine.” Laughter followed her retreat.
There I sat, alone with the small start of life in my womb. Alone with Karada’s memories and bits of Rory’s journal pages. The darkness of the room did not deter my vision. I opened the coffin only to discover my captor’s latest kill. He stared up at the ceiling with his wide, dead eyes, his mouth turned in a state of bliss. Bite marks all over his neck and chest evidenced his untimely end.
“Sloppy work,” I said.
There had to be some way out. Just because she hadn’t found it in all the time she remained imprisoned didn’t mean there wasn’t one.
I closed the coffin. Pacing, the bloodied clawed lines over the walls reminded me escape had to be impossible. I smoothed my fingers over the stone walls. Cold marble gave no clue to a way out. I sat in the corner. A black beetle crawled over the pieces of old paper to vanish beneath the door.
Night slipped away.
To a vampire, time passes differently than to a human. I marked my time by hunger and pain. I needed to feed. I needed blood. It didn’t matter if my body wasted away. My fear was for the small being within me. I could not let my child die. The pulse of the tiny one’s heart egged me on. I scraped at the marble beneath the door with a handle I’d broken off the coffin.
When the baby’s heartbeat waned, I gave in.
My fingers wrinkled, my skin became pasty, and I screamed out with all my might for the creature who had imprisoned me here. I would surrender, let her keep me as her underling, anything as long as the baby survived.
“Karada!” I raged and shouted until my voice went hoarse. For weeks I called to her. I tried to reach her with my mind, desperate now, my stomach a dull ache inside me.
“Karada! Karada!”
Chapter Thirteen
Misery
Misery engulfed my heart. I curled in the corner, lying on one side. With no energy left, I wept in tearless sobs. She had forgotten me. A gray haze settled over my mind. I imagined if I could see the night sky it would be a dark shade of red too murky to let the stars shine through. My hair had fallen out in clumps which lay mixed on the dust-covered floor with the scraps of paper. My clothes I’d shredded in my boredom and sadness. I could not eat. I could not survive. The corpse accompanying me no longer smelled, and maggots had long since eaten away anything worth taking.
The tiny thump of hope inside my womb stopped in one deafening moment.
Karada had taken everything from me just as Rory had.
Adrift in a black oblivion, far beyond the reach of hunger, I lost myself in the sadness. Time passed and escaped me. My body stiffened, and yet, I did not die. I subsisted on air alone, too weak to move, too starved to think coherent thoughts. As years left me, I envisioned Karada’s face in the doorway before she locked me in this hellish prison. The taste of her blood remained on my tongue in that abysmal eternity. I will taste it again, I promised myself. And I will drink her dry.
Stone grated across stone.
Laughter awakened my consciousness.
My nostrils flared as much as they could in the state of catatonia I’d fallen into. I smelled the source of my hatred. I wanted her, to taste her, to bleed her and make her suffer for what she did to me.
“Little angel, I’ve been so busy. Are you ready to come play with me?”
I could not open my eyes.
Cold fingers found purchase beneath my armpits and pulled my emaciated body from its resting place.
Karada carried me from the mausoleum, her words dancing in the night.
“Eat, little one.”
Yes, it was night. I could not see it, but I felt it, cool, crisp, rent with the promise of a second chance. Flesh crushed into my mouth. Blood, thick as tar, entered my throat. I could not swallow, could not suckle. It drained into me, vile and tainted with her memories, her thoughts. I saw her victims, felt her glory in the death she brought about.
The stiffness of my body ebbed, but not enough to allow me movement yet.
My eyelids cracked open, freezing in place. I watched my prey, the wicked thing of a woman who had locked me away and forgotten me, killed my baby, and stolen away my life. A fair glow lingered around her smooth face. She looked like the painting now, surreal in her beauty.
Even as she pulled her wrist from my mouth, I knew I hadn’t the strength to harm her. She knew it too. Once more I was someone’s toy to be played with and discarded on a whim.
“I went to Egypt,” she told me, as if I cared where she had been. “Such a bustling place. I saw the pyramids, the great desert, shopped in the streets like when I was a child.” She sat beside me smoothing her clothes and brushing off dust from carrying me in. “In the museums, I found the most devilish mummies. You look like one now.”
I wanted to slap her.
She giggled and ran cold fingers over my bald scalp. “In time you will look like yourself again. You have only to feed properly. It will take a few months, but don’t worry. You and I have all the time in the world.” She rested her palm on my cheek, patting it with a condescendence that so reminded me of Rory. “You want me to take care of you, don’t you?”
“Yes.” The single word came out slurred, for my lips could not move correctly.
The small lie lit up Karada’s face. She seemed pleased by my assent. Standing, she shook her mane of hair off her shoulders before she went to study herself in the mirror. My eyes rolled to follow her. The mirror showed me what a hideous thing I had become. My skin stretched like a cadaver’s left out to dry in the sun. My eyes were sunken as were my cheeks. Bald and zombie-like, I stared at the reflection of myself and hated Karada more.
My shoulders itched, a faint tickle evidencing my wings. But I had not the strength to call them forth or the energy within to make it so.
She went out.
I remained frozen there on the bed to wait for her return.
On the cusp of dawn twilight, Karada brought me a young boy. He couldn’t have been more than five years old. Already his neck bore marks where she’d drank. Bleary-eyed and dazed, he didn’t struggle when she lifted his body and pressed his skin to my lips. God forgive me, I drank. I sucked and slavered and hated myself for it.
His blood did not even begin to sate the drought my body endured.
She brought me children on purpose. Time and again, she carried them to my bed where I fed and bore my guilt.
Karada enjoyed my suffering.
She starved me, letting me feed only every few days. Helpless and weak, I endured as she dressed me in frumpish clothing and rubbed lotions into my skin. Some nights she painted my face with lipstick and eyeliner so that we matched in a macabre way—me being the dead version and she being the one with life.
During the day, she cuddled next to me and held me against her in the bed I had shared with Rory. She tried to push into my mind on such close times, but I had practiced closing myself off, a task which consisted of having no thoughts at all. Apparently, she needed something to latch onto when she tried to control my mind. Sighing
with frustration, she soon gave up.
It took three months before I could stand. Walking proved impossible yet. Karada sat on the edge of the bed or by the mirror talking to me about her history, her silly tales, and of bedding men only to kill them when she tired of their company.
“Rory should have been like that,” she explained with a sudden wistfulness. “He wasn’t like the others who used the women in the slave houses for pleasure. He came down there one night, raving mad and repeating some nonsense over and over. I liked his hair.” She winked at me. “Rory had beautiful hair, don’t you think so?”
“Yes,” I answered, not caring one way or the other. My gums tingled with the need to send forth my fangs. Karada’s neck looked tempting this night. “He was good in bed, too.”
Her expression darkened with jealousy, narrowing her eyes and tensing her eyebrows. I liked to do little things like that, to piss her off and test her. For a being so old, she did not show much complexity. I thought of her as a petulant child given to tantrums and fits of emotional rage.
“He was,” she finally agreed. “Most men aren’t. He knew what I wanted. You can thank me for your nights of pleasure. Everything he learned came from my guidance.”
“I see.”
She combed through her hair in languid strokes as she went on. “I couldn’t quiet him, and I hadn’t disposed of the bodies yet, so I took him to the forest. My belly was full. I didn’t want to feed, so I kissed him to shut him up.” She snorted out a laugh. “He turned bright red. I don’t think anyone had ever kissed him before.”
“What was wrong with him?” I asked, curious now. “What made him feed on people with mental illnesses?”
She tied off a gathering of her hair with a band before she answered. “He sought himself in them, I think. He remembered that part of his life, when he suffered, when he heard the voices. He wanted to end the suffering of those like him.”
“So, he was insane when you turned him?”
“Perhaps.” She tied off another lock of hair.
I reached up and felt the fuzz where my hair had grown in. It would take more time yet to have it all back. “And who turned you, Karada?”
Her lips pursed. She sat there, quiet for a long while as her eyes flickered with red glints. “His name was Charon.” For the first time when she recounted one of her tales, Karada turned away from me to stare at the painting. Her voice no longer carried frivolous emotions. “I had been in the pleasure house for nearly a year then. He took me one night, paid double the price, and returned again a week later. He hurt me,” she whispered. “Beat me.”
“Did you love him?”
Her eyes slipped shut.
I pushed off the bed. My feet felt like two concrete blocks, heavy and useless. I shuffled one forward and almost fell. Determined, I shuffled the other. Shuffle, pause, shuffle, pause, I stood behind her and placed my hand on her shoulder.
She flinched.
I grinned, revealing my fangs.
“You’re hungry, aren’t you, little one?”
“Yes,” I answered, and ran the pad of my thumb along her soft neck. It was too soon, but I didn’t care. I tired of her stories. I wanted this to end...now. “Please, may I drink from you, Mistress?”
She smiled, her own fangs coming down at the thought of feeding. Karada stood to face me and nodded. “You may have a little until I bring you another child. Such sweet blood they have.”
“Not as sweet as yours, mistress.”
Flattery amused her. She pushed away her hair and offered me her neck. This trust surprised me. Before now, it had been her wrist alone. I feathered my fingers along her cheek, brushed my lips over her skin, and kissed her there.
Karada moaned with delight.
In the mirror, I watched myself change into a predator as I bit down. Her blood flowed slow, forcing me to work for it. I drank with greed, with an unkind voraciousness held back until this moment. She gripped my waist, her claws sinking into my flesh. I didn’t care. No pain she inflicted would stop me. No battle would be enough to cause me to let go.
I drank and drained away her soul, its filth melding with me.
I think she realized my intent at the last moments. She screeched in fury and batted at me, raking lines over my back, tearing away cloth and skin. In the end, I lowered her to the floor and reached for her chest, burying my claws within, past ribs, directly to her heart. I crushed it, holding the muscular mass until the last of her blood filled me.
I feared letting go.
What if she was not dead yet?
Her strength pooled inside me. I willed my wings to grow. They appeared, tattered and worn when they spread at my sides. Her throat still clasped in my fangs, I carried Karada outside. On the patio, paces from where Rory had met his end, I tore out her heart and tossed it aside. Next I took her head, wrenching it free of her body the moment my fangs left her flesh. I loathed her and found myself a monster just as she had been, just as Rory had as well.
I dropped her head on the flagstone and took to the air with her body. The memory of Rory sewing her back together in the mausoleum disturbed me. I didn’t want such an atrocity to occur a second time, no matter how unlikely.
The sun rimmed the horizon. Light blinded me. I faltered and fell, a horrible dark angel bearing the corpse of a beast. The body slipped free of my grip. I plummeted through trees and crashed in a pile of brush. Karada’s headless remains landed paces away at the edge of the river. I crawled to the closest darkness, an outcropping of stones near the water. There was no time to return to the mansion. Wedging myself in the crevasse, I watched the sun’s rays reach down into the shadows to banish the night. The light touched her skin, frying it an unpleasant black. She sizzled and smoked for hours until, at last, Karada’s remains turned to ash.
I closed my eyes and slept.
Chapter Fourteen
Angel
A raccoon clambered past, waking me. When I pulled free of the rocks, the animal froze. Its shiny black eyes regarded me for an instant before it darted into the bushes. I stretched my arms and wings. My back hurt from the sun’s fury. Ignoring the pain, I kicked away all of Karada’s ashes.
I decided not to return to the mansion again.
With no clue how much time had passed, I made my way to the city, to my mother’s old apartment. I stood on the balcony at night, watching the family within. The place had finally been rented. I couldn’t hide there anymore.
For weeks, I lurked in the shadows of the alleys and went back to my old ways, feeding on those who wouldn’t be missed. I stole their clothes. I bathed in the apartments or homes of people who weren’t home at night. In the window outside a late-night diner, I stopped one night and gawked at the family eating inside much as Karada had done to me.
Tommy Davis sat there spooning food into a child’s mouth, a gold band on his finger. A woman sat across from him eating. She had long, black hair and olive skin. Her smile, warm and kind, did not bring any joy to my heart. I wanted to kill her. I wanted to tear her away from the booth, from the man who should have been mine and murder her in the streets.
The little girl noticed me. She pointed and cooed.
I shielded myself, a new trick, one Rory had never revealed. As a cloud of dark mist, I left the place, my heart frozen, my soul forever crushed by this discovery.
For a year, I managed to stay away. The scene niggled at me, invading my dreams, only in them I took the place of the other woman. I was Tommy’s wife and the girl was our child. One frosty winter’s night, I left my current haunt to press fate for answers. I flew to Tommy’s building and climbed down the stairs to his floor thinking he couldn’t possibly live in the same place anymore.
I turned the lock with my mind.
Like an apparition of doom, I entered and found Fate to be a cruel mistress indeed. His picture hung on the wall in the living room with the woman and child as well. Tommy Davis had married and forgotten me. I hated myself for the jealousy. How could he have
waited? For four years I’d been in that mausoleum. He probably thought I wasn’t coming back.
Did he wonder what happened to our child? Did he think of me?
I had to know.
In his bedroom, I cried. Snoring, he slept with his back to his wife. I knelt by the bed and touched his face gently so as not to wake him. My fangs lengthened, awaiting my meal. Karada was right about one thing. My body remembered the taste of him and wanted it again.
Disgusted by this revelation, I pulled my hand away. For the better part of the night, I remained, watching over the man I loved and feeling more alone than I had all my life. Now Tommy was truly lost to me. My last hope of some semblance of salvation had vanished when he took his bride.
I glanced over the woman. Her black hair framed a slightly rounded face with large lips and a Grecian nose. Her beauty reminded me of Karada, of my failings, and of the fact that I never really could have been his wife.
I considered killing her. It would not take long, a quick nip at her exposed neck, a whisper in her mind to quiet any fear. How cruel I have become.
Defeated by my conscience, I left the bedroom, thinking I could slip away now unnoticed and come back another night to stare at what I’d lost. At the door, a tiny sound alerted me to my spy. She stood by the couch, a teddy bear clutched in one hand, her hair in a messy braid. “Are you Mama’s angel?” she asked.
The time I’d spent feasting on children made my guilt swell along with my hunger. I licked my lips, teeth reaching down once more. I took a step toward this little one, remembering the sweet taste of innocence.
“No,” I answered in a husky voice. “I’m your father’s angel. I always have been.”
The child stuck out her bottom lip, glaring at me. She trudged down the hall. Stopping halfway, she turned. Her frown softened. “Maybe you can tell Mommy’s angel to come. She needs one now.”
