Meeting Eternity (The Sullivan Vampires, Volume 1

by Bridget Essex

  So many strange feelings, and I had no place to put them. I had half a mind to wake Gwen up and talk with her until we were supposed to go on shift, sort out all of these muddled feelings and half memories over warm cups of tea and curled up together on the couch, but that would have been cruel to a friend who had gotten me this strange job in the first place. Gwen slept through the night, arguably needed her sleep (you know, like most normal people tend to do) and the few times I’d ever woken her up with a phone call at these sorts of hours, she was mumbly and practically incoherent anyway.

  So I found the spiral staircase leading down, and I followed it. Down and down and down until the very first floor and the dimly lit corridor of art that made the red and black checkerboard floor seem to glow dimly with all of the little lamps over each painting illuminated. I dug my hands into my coat pockets—the wide, open corridor was very chilly—and I walked with my head down, my steps wide and quick, devouring the space between myself and the front door.

  The click of my boots against the floor echoed around me as I followed the curving hallway until I was alongside the front desk and the steep steps of the Widowmaker staircase. I stared up at it with wide eyes. It seemed impossible to me that anyone would call it anything but a ladder. It was impossibly steep—no wonder I’d almost fallen down it. It was this ramshackle steep staircase that seemed like it might wobble and fall to pieces if you’d so much as look at it funny. Could it even support the weight of a single person? It was so incongruous with how magnificent and well-kept everything else in this place seemed to be.

  The wide, wooden front desk was empty, not surprisingly, and I slipped past it without a sound, turning the large front door’s knob with cold fingers.

  And then I was outside, beneath an unspeakable amount of stars, the chill of the out-of-doors so sudden and cold that it seemed to snatch my breath from me as I shut the massive front door behind me. I stood very still on the stone front porch, and I listened, my ears pricking for sound in the velvet darkness of a too-early hour. That’s when I heard it: the unmistakable shush of the ocean tide.

  Gwen had told me that the Sullivan Hotel was located on a cliff face, and I had no desire to tumble to my death like a heroine in an old classic British novel (or BBC remake). But the lights in the small parking lot, a parking lot that was much too small for such a big hotel, illuminated a quaint, hand-painted wooden sign that had an arrow pointing toward a gravel-lined path. The words “Beach Trail” were painted in a red, looping script, with a curving, beckoning arrow pointing onward. I took a breath and huffed it out, my exhale curling up like smoke into the air, as I made a split-second decision and crossed the expanse of parking lot beneath the fluorescent bulbs. I entered the path to the beach trail, promising myself that if it grew too steep or was a bit too treacherous, I’d turn back.

  The crunch of the gravel beneath my boots was a comforting rhythm. When I walked past the hedge of shrubs lining the parking lot, down the trail itself, the shush of the ocean became louder, brighter. Clearer, somehow. My eyes were still adjusting to the dark, but now I could see the ocean, spreading out beneath me.

  The trail down to the beach was a wide expanse that had probably been used for cars or maybe even carts, once upon a time. It was about ten feet wide and cut into the actual rock side of the cliff. It sloped very gradually and gracefully downward, toward the beach. The beach itself was very easy to see—I wondered what color the sand was in the daylight, because now in the monochrome of night, it looked like brilliant white. The scent of the salt in the air lifted my spirits, and I began to feel less tired as I watched the white-cap waves rush toward the shore as I made my way down the path. The waves broke on the seemingly-white sand, and frothed up energetically.

  When I reached the bottom of the trail, my boots hit the beach. I staggered a little as I gained my balance on the sand (reminding myself that I wouldn’t wear boots with heels when I came this way again), and set off across the expansive beach, toward the line where the ocean met the shore.

  Now, the sound was almost deafening, the crash of the water hitting the earth. It was also comforting, soothing, at the exact same time that it was slightly unnerving. I think that unless you’ve grown up with it, the sea at night is always a little bit of a frightening thing. The fear comes from our old memories from when we were still cavemen gathered closely around the fire to keep the dark away. The sea is something that we still don’t fully understand, and tales of sea monsters are still told around campfires. I stood very still, my heels sinking backward into the sand, thinking about the darkness of the water, the whiteness of it breaking against the shore, the millions of stars I could see overhead as I tilted my head up and back.

  I felt so small, so insignificant beneath that beautiful brilliance of starlight. I thought about Anna, and I thought about Kane, and as I stared at the stars, I didn’t feel guilt for thinking about either of them. Usually, I felt so much pain when I thought about Anna. And I did feel pain as I thought on her, yes. But it wasn’t the fresh pain that I almost always felt. It was dull and quieter, now, and I could take a breath when I thought of her.

  And when I thought of Kane…there was a flutter in my heart.

  Should I have even been thinking about Kane? Had it been long enough since Anna? Half a year had come and gone since the accident, and it felt like a lifetime, and it felt like only a moment had passed, all at the same time. There were so many “shoulds” and “should nots” that it made my stomach turn, but I did my best, as I felt so small beneath those stars, to simply concentrate on what I was feeling. I didn’t understand all of it, it was true. But Kane made me feel something that I hadn’t felt in so long.

  There was possibility in Kane.

  Okay, maybe she wasn’t a lesbian. Maybe she wouldn’t want me, even if she was one. Maybe she was already taken. There was so much unknown and uncertain about this woman, but that was all right. I didn’t know, and as I stood beneath that glorious spread of stars, next to the seemingly unending ocean, there was just…possibility.

  And for the first time in what seemed like forever…I felt something pricking inside of me, something growing and unfurling like a blossom opening in my heart.

  It was hope.

  It was at that moment that I saw the body in the water.

  If my eyes hadn’t become so adjusted to the monochrome of the night, I never would have seen that dark curve of shadow, out in the tossing white waves. But they had adjusted, and I could see as I looked out to the water, feeling a million things and feeling hope rise up in my chest, but it was all shattered in that instant. I blinked back the salt spray of the water, took a step forward, and my boot hit the incoming curl of the tide. What? What had I just seen? It must have been a fish. Or a shark. Or a dolphin. But as I trained my eyes on the incoming waves, I saw it again. Or I thought I saw it. A human form, waving arms above the water.

  And then, so faint that it almost seemed not real, I heard the softest whisper of sound:

  “Help me.”

  Another incoming wave, another glimpse of someone flailing pale arms above the water, and I didn’t hesitate. I’ve always been a good swimmer. My mother insisted that I started taking lessons at my local pool by the age of three. I can swim in my sleep, but I’d never struggled out of a coat and boots on the water’s edge in October in Maine. I threw back my coat and my boots farther up the shore so they wouldn’t get taken by the tide, and then I stepped into the waves.

  The shock of the cold took all of my breath as I staggered forward, half-jogging, half-tripping as I tried to find my way in deeper without getting knocked off my feet by the insistent waves. This close up, they seemed so much bigger, and they’d already seemed pretty big to me, the gigantic frothy things that kept churning milk-white foam up onto the shore. I tried to keep the figure in my sights as my feet were taken out from under me, and I set out with a strong breaststroke toward the person. But it was almost impossible to swim in this water. The salt stung my eyes a
s I tried to keep them open, as I tried to keep watching for this person, keep it in my sights, and the cold snatched my breath away.

  The cold was everywhere, every last inch of me, inside and out. I’m the kind of person who can’t even really stand a less-than-piping-hot shower, so as I tried to shoulder my way through the water, as I tried to just move through it and stay afloat, staying above and over those waves, I kept losing my breath. I felt the pounding of my heart, and everything shook, even as I tried to slice through the water toward the person.

  The first frozen wave hit me full on in the face, and I took a great mouthful of water that somehow ended up a bit in my lungs, too. I surfaced, spluttering and coughing, trying to keep my breaths steady and long, even as my lungs hitched up, deeply unhappy at the freezing water I’d accidentally inhaled. I struggled to breathe, struggled to stay on the surface, struggled to stay alive as the frozen water pulled me down and under, pulled me farther out to sea.

  I’d never been in waters like these before: black and icy and completely treacherous. All thoughts of the drowning person began to be covered up by the very real and present thought that maybe I was becoming a drowning person.

  I spluttered upward again, my eyes wide open in the murky dark as I tried to find the surface after being pulled under again. How had I gotten out this far? I glanced backward toward shore, and the icy shock began to fill me as I realized exactly how far out I was. The cold of the water was making my muscles move slower, more sluggish. I could hardly breathe, and as I moved slower, like a wind-up toy that was slowly winding down, I felt fear begin to fill me up, much like the cold and the salt water. I tried to press through the water with my arms, pumping my legs with a sudden surge of adrenaline as I struggled against the waves.

  Was this really how I was going to go? I kept thinking that, looping the thought around and around as my adrenaline became more pronounced, and I kicked harder against the frozen waves, as I sought to climb them with more strength. I took in a great lungful of air and suppressed the urge to cough it all back out, because of the bits of salt water still in my lungs. With the air in me, I rose a little higher in the water, the frozen water that was slowly numbing every part of me. I crested on the surface, and I glanced back toward shore again.

  It was so much farther away.

  That’s when something bumped my leg.

  I was too far out to even hope for it to be the sandy bottom of the ocean, but I still thought that desperately. Or maybe it was a rock, a rock I could stand on. But in the back of my mind, I knew absolutely that it was neither one of those things.

  Whatever had hit me had been slightly pliable. Slightly soft. It had hit me much the same that the smack of meat against skin would feel like.

  It was a living thing.

  Panic set in. A shark. It was the only thing I could think of. I’d bumped into a shark. A shark in Maine in very, very cold October waters? But I had no sense, only fear, and fear makes us think very strange things. So no, it couldn’t have been a shark, but I still thought it was one anyway. I kicked out violently to get away from the thing, kicked out and tried to turn my body, my body that the ocean was tearing farther and farther out to sea with frozen waters. I kicked out, trying to move even an inch back toward shore. But it was impossible.

  And something bumped against my leg again.

  I screamed. I got a mouthful of cold salt water for my efforts, and because of that, I lost the last of the air that had been making me a little buoyant, and I went underwater as I thrashed in my panic. I opened my eyes, trying desperately to see whatever it was that had bumped my leg.

  There was a woman underwater.

  The woman who had been drowning. I could see her black hair and her pale arms. She was wearing something that bared her arms. Pure instinct took over, and I grasped at one of those arms, trying to haul her up toward air, as much as I was trying to get myself there. I sunk down a little as I tried to pull her upward, and I felt her cold skin under my hand, slick and too cold for me to even hold, my numb fingers trying to maintain purchase of her. She was so heavy, impossible heavy. She might already be dead. I didn’t know. I just knew that I needed air, or I was going to die. But I couldn’t leave her here.

  I kicked with my legs, used my other arm to try and propel myself upwards, toward the roiling surface of the ocean with its white waves and its violent power.

  I couldn’t reach it. I couldn’t haul her up, with my last reserves of strength, and reach the surface. It was one or the other. We were both going to die here. Or she could just die. And really, she might already be dead. She might. I might be doing all of this for a dead woman. I might be about to die for a dead woman.

  But I couldn’t let her go. I couldn’t. Somewhere, within me, I found the last bits of strength. I scraped them together. I kicked with my legs and hauled on her arm, and somehow, impossibly, I reached the surface.

  I took a glorious, too-cold breath of air and leaned back my head, trying to float as I tried to haul her body up, too.

  Something tugged her out of my grasp. A wave. A current.

  My fingers left her skin. She was pulled back under and gone.

  I whirled around, tried peering under into the water. A shark? Had a shark taken her? Or a particularly strong wave? But I’d been gripping her with all of my might, and she was just suddenly…gone.

  Something bumped against my leg again.

  And I was dragged underwater.

  There was a swirl of bubbles, of dark, murky water that was almost impossible to see through. But despite all of that, I could still see what was happening as clear as day. Maybe it was the fear, sharpening my sight. Because the woman underwater had her eyes open. She had dragged me underwater with her hands on my leg, her fingers crawling up my leg to my waist and then my arms, pinning me there as she smiled at me, her eyes flashing.

  What was happening? It was…Mags.

  Her grin was too wide, stretching her face out of shape. Her eyes were open, and I knew she wasn’t dead as she turned her face, her mouth opening as she began to draw me towards her slowly. There was a flash of white, in the dark, and I saw something, then, that it was impossible to understand.

  Her teeth. They were long. Impossibly long. And sharp. She looked like a shark herself, with dead, doll eyes as she tilted back her head, her mouth wide and open and sharper than anything I could imagine. She drew her head back, and then as fast as a thought, she snaked herself forward and buried her mouth in my neck.

  The pain was unbearable. It was cold and hot, all at once. I felt like my flesh was being sawed into. It was too much. I felt her fingers, her sharp, pricking fingers, bury into the flesh of my arms, and her mouth bury into my neck, and I didn’t have any thoughts, really. I was too cold, in too much pain and panic, to think anything. I tilted my head back, saw the surface of the dark water far, far above me, and I sunk down below the water with her.

  I knew I was going to die.

  I knew I was dying.

  It’s strange how, in moments like that, everything can seem so much sharper, so much clearer. There was a shape above us that I had not noticed before, not until that moment. It was a sort-of human shape, I suppose, though I couldn’t make out exact features. I could just make out something that looked, so much, like angel wings, wings that were white-blonde to my eye, though that made no sense.

  The last of my breath escaped me. My lungs filled with water.

  I closed my eyes.

  I wish, I thought. But there was too much to wish for anything specific. For the first time in a very long time, I wanted to live again. I wanted to be alive. I wanted to try with Kane, see if she might be interested. I wanted to try to live a good life. I realized, now, that that’s what Anna would have wanted. I’d been so blind. She would have just wanted me to be happy, and I’d been so unhappy for so long. And I wouldn’t be able to fix it now.

  I wish.

  Nothingness rolled over me like the falling night.

  And I d
ied.

  ---

  I was weightless. It was so dark.

  And from far, far away, I heard voices.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” It was so soft, so sibilant, those words, that I almost couldn’t hear them. They made everything seem to tremble, though I couldn’t feel anything. It was just a knowing. Those words made the ground quake.

  “I wanted her. I was hungry.” A whining, sibilant sound, those words. The woman who spoke them sounded…well. Frightened.

  “Get out of my sight.”

  Silence.

  A soft shushing sound. Like waves. And, somewhere, the crying of a gull.

  A new voice. A gentle woman’s voice that sounded deep and wise. And kind: “You know what you have to do, Kane.”

  A sigh that sounded pained. And then the first voice said: “Not yet, Branna. I can’t. I can’t bear to. She hasn’t been given a choice. She can’t be turned, not like this.”

  There was a pause. And then a shifting sound, like someone was touching the fabric on another’s shoulder. “She’s dead, Kane. How else can you bring her back? And you do want to bring her back. I can see it in your eyes. I could see it from the first moment she came here. There’s something about this one. Something you quite like.”

  “Branna, I can’t.” There was such anguish in that last word, such pain and sorrow and suffering that it filled me. I wanted to ease that pain. That smooth, dusky voice needed to be spared that pain.

  I knew that voice.

  “Mags has gone too far. She’ll have to be taught a lesson.” The gentle voice had turned sharper, now.

  “Yes.” The voice was a growl.

  The gentle voice was thoughtful. “If you won’t change the girl, you can try to give her blood back.”

  “I know.”

  “You also know that the chance of survival is almost impossible.”

  “I…know.”