She blinked, suddenly back in the room as she smiled. “Would you like me to tell you how Kane and I came to be…” She gestured down at herself and tapped her lips with a little chuckle, “the way we are?”
“Yes,” I told her, the cool scent of peppermint unfurling in my mouth as I took another sip.
Bran leaned back in her chair, gazing up at the ceiling for a long moment.
“It began the day I died,” she whispered.
---
A very long time ago, over three hundred years ago now if you’d believe it, we lived in Ireland. Kane and I had grown up in a very small village near the coast where everyone knew everyone else, and it was such a hard life full of dawn to dusk work to survive, but we were content in it. Kane wasn’t called Kane back then. Her mother had named her Mercy, the very last thing Kane’s mother did before she passed, having brought her only child into the world.
Back then…well. It wasn’t so easy to love women if you were a woman yourself. Mercy and I knew the truth of each other, and in the very beginning, when we were teenaged girls, we’d kissed one another in my father’s thatched barn during a rainstorm, our very first kiss. We both agreed that this was what we wanted, but oh how we’d laughed after kissing each other. We both knew we wanted women, but we did not want each other. We became so close, after that. We were both comrades in a secret sort of society that contained only each other. And we kept those secrets close.
One day, I was out in the fields with Mercy. We were breaking up the sod, for it was March or so, and the winter had been treacherous and we needed to begin the planting, or there would be nothing to eat that year. I still remember those wants and worries. If you didn’t plant your own food, you would be so hungry that winter, you might perish. My mother was a drunkard, and my father had gone on to meet his god when I was very small, so Mercy helped me with my fields often.
I remember that day. The sun was bright, but wan in the sky. There was the scent of spring in the air, of a quickening of green that I could almost taste, and energy surged through me as we methodically broke through the chunks of sod, making the dirt ready for the seeds.
Our village was out of the way of most of the major roads, so there was little more than a footpath that connected our village to the next one. But still, we heard the tell-tale creak of carriage wheels over tussocked meadow, and we both straightened, squinting into the sunlight.
There was a coach coming along that footpath. Two massive black horses pulled it, and the driver was cloaked and hooded in black, even in the fine daylight. The coach was black, black as Death’s own coach, and as it trundled over the rutted earth, a chill passed over me.
We had stories, in old Ireland, of banshees—dark spirits--coming to scream at us when death approached, and it seemed, at that moment as we both straightened and looked at that black coach, that a faint scream came, shrill and sharp, into the air.
But there was no one around to have screamed it.
The massive coach with all of its fripperies and ornamentation creaked to a stop beside our stretch of field looking so wildly out of place that in any other situation, I might have laughed at it. The driver dismounted with a great leap from the top of the coach, which seemed almost impossible, as it was a good almost ten feet to the ground. It was almost otherworldly, the way that he leapt and then straightened, too, and he was opening up the door of the coach before we could even blink.
And out of that door was thrust a delicate, expensive black boot. And attached to that pretty little boot was a woman. She descended down onto the ground in a swirl of black cloth, for she was clothed in black from the top of her head, covered in a black veil, to those pointed black boots. She wore the sumptuous, massive black gown of a gentlewoman or lady, and I knew by the big black horses and coach, coachmen and gown, that this was a very rich women. And rich women never came to our part of the country.
I felt a violent chill descend over my skin as she all but drifted over the broken sod, over the uneven ground that anyone would have had a difficult time walking over, as if she was as light as the angels themselves, her pretty, useless boots getting stuck in not a single rut. I’d been walking the fields my whole life, but I still tripped over them like a gangly calf.
She floated across the ground like the devil himself..
I could not see her eyes behind that heavy black veil. But I knew from the angle of her body, the way she curved across the earth, that she was not looking at me.
She had eyes only for Mercy.
We didn’t really have nobles, as you might call them now, in that area of Ireland back then. It was mostly very poor peasants, Irishmen trying to make their living by being a little more stubborn than the stubborn land itself. A lot of folk were heading over to America, even back then, and our own village had lost quite a few people to the lure of easier times in the golden land of opportunity. As such, we were only used to being around fellow peasants, weren’t used to being around anyone of higher rank than us, which is why Mercy stood her ground as the woman drifted ever closer to her.
But there was something not quite right about the woman, and though I’d never been a superstitious person, I felt that there was more than a little something of the devil about this stranger. So I stepped closer to Mercy, tugged at her shirtsleeve.
“It’s all right, Bran,” she told me smoothly, her mouth in an insolent smile as she gazed at the stranger. “It’s only a high and mighty lady come to see those who are beneath her.”
The woman in her relentless approach of us paused.
And then, from beneath that black veil, came laughter. High, piercing laughter that made my head ache, that sounded so sinister with its musicality and cruelty. It didn’t sound human.
Mercy, beside me, stiffened, but didn’t remove her gaze from the approaching woman. If possible, my friend’s eyes flashed even brighter as she stared at this strange woman who floated across the rutted land toward us. Mercy’s stance was wide, her hands at her sides curled into tight fists.
She was ready to fight if she had to. That was just Mercy’s way. There had never been a single thing in the world that frightened her.
I wasn’t exactly quaking in my boots, either. But there was fear in me as I stared at this stranger.
“Don’t be afraid,” the woman whispered, then, as if she could hear my very thoughts, and my knees grew weak at the sound of her words. My legs quaked, but I tried to be as strong as I could as the woman finally stopped, close enough to reach out and touch the lace of her garment. Mercy stood, leaning forward, her shoulders back, as she gazed at this woman with flashing eyes, defiance radiating from her.
“Who are you?” she demanded, and again, the woman laughed. I felt light-headed, as if I would fall against the sod, but I tried to stand firm.
But the sound of the woman didn’t affect Mercy one bit.
She stood and did not waver.
“In all of my many years,” the woman whispered, the sound sibilant and hissing like a snake as she stepped closer, as she wrapped her long, gloved fingers around Mercy’s wrists, tugging her forward, “I have never met a girl I could not seduce with a single thought. There is something in you. Something special. I would have you come to me and be mine.”
Mercy and I had often thought about the sort of girl we would want to have if we could even dream of such a thing. Mercy had told me, often, about a dream she had about a red-headed girl. There were a lot of red-headed girls where we lived, so we really thought nothing of it. But in all that Mercy had ever told me, she’d never spoken of this type of woman being something she was attracted to, someone dark and sinister and otherworldly.
And Mercy held true to this. For she did not budge. The woman tugged on her wrists, but Mercy stood where she was, feet planted firmly against the earth and shoulders back as her nostrils flared.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” she said with finality.
“You love women. Do not deny it,” the stranger hissed as she tu
gged on Mercy’s wrists. “And here in this miserable little cesspool of a village, this loving women will get you killed. If you come with me, I will take you to a place where that’s not even a consideration. Where you could be safe to be yourself. In my home, you can be anything you want to be.” Her words were dripping with charm, and they made sense to me. I wanted to go with this woman, even though I hadn’t even been asked. I would have followed her into the depths of hell if she’d asked, as my earlier thoughts about her, my bad feelings about her, seemed to have evaporated.
“No,” Mercy persisted.
“Three times,” whispered the woman, then, her voice darkening to a dangerous hiss. “Three times will I ask if you will come with me of your own free will. Three times will I ask, and only three, and if you do not say yes, I will simply take you.”
Mercy leaned forward then, leaned forward with such crackling energy, I took a step back.
“You will never have me,” was what she whispered.
It was then that the coachman stepped forward with his whip and his strong hands. He dealt a blow to the back of my head, and I do not know what they did with Mercy. But when I came to, we were in the coach with the strange woman.
And I no longer felt as if she was there to help us. Or that she was lovely. For the leather flaps had been rolled down over the coach windows, and in the darkness, she had removed her black lace veil.
She had long, unkempt black hair that did not shine in the subdued light but seemed to swallow any light that came near to her, and there was dried blood around her small, wrinkled mouth. And when she stared at me with her bright blue eyes that seemed to flash with raw power, I felt a shudder go through me.
Mercy though, beside me, was unafraid.
“Return us now,” she growled.
The woman tilted back her head and laughed and laughed, a snarl at the end of ever chuckle. “Why should I return you?” she told us. “There is not a soul who will miss you, not a soul you have left behind that would not jump at the idea of having one less mouth to feed. Now you both belong to me.” She leaned forward then, and she smiled.
Her teeth that had been such perfectly normal, human teeth before, seemed to…grow, even as we watched, the old ivory color against her blood-red tongue lengthening, sharpening. And her incisors became as deadly and as sharp as a wolf’s as she licked her lips and stared at us with evil, triumphant eyes.
We sat across from her in the coach, and she crossed that space between us in a heartbeat, as quick as death. In another heartbeat and without me even seeing the movement, she had her arms around Mercy’s shoulders, hanging there, but it was not the passionate embrace of a lover. It was the sort of embrace an insolent cat does to a half-dead mouse right before it’s about to devour it. She snapped back her head, and in the dull light of the coach, I saw her wet teeth flash as she opened her mouth wide and darted forward. She sunk her teeth into Mercy’s neck, even as Mercy kicked and screamed, even as Mercy fought as furious as she-devil. I fought, too, but two girls against one monstrous woman was no match.
She bit us, and we bled, and she drank until there was nothing left to drink.
She drained us dry.
We were meant to die. She drained us on the way back to her castle like a light afternoon snack, and her evil coachman dumped our bodies down into the depths of her cellar when she returned, kicking out our corpses into a shaft that led down to the lowest cellar, which might be more appropriately dubbed her dungeon. So we fell there, but we were not alone, for our bodies collapsed beside the other, rotting corpses of the woman’s gluttony, all young girls she’d lured with different stories, all young girls killed in the prime of her youth so that she could be satiated and satisfied and drunk from the blood of the innocent.
So we fell among the dead girls after we’d been drained dry, and we should have died.
So we did.
During the fight in the carriage, we had bit and scratched and kicked and punched, and a little bit of the woman’s blood had spattered against our mouths and the ragged wounds in our necks that she’d inflicted with her teeth. Now, vampire blood is very strong. The cells seek a body like hunters themselves, for they crave to be inside a creature. We were drained dry, not a single drop of human blood remained with in.
But a few drops of vampire blood had gotten inside of us.
A few drops of vampire blood alone is not enough to save a human being or turn them from human into vampire. It needs to be a great amount of blood given from a vampire into a human in order to turn that human into a vampire. But sometimes, when people are very, very strong or the will to live and fight again is raging through them, there is the slimmest of chances that a few drops of blood is enough to begin the change.
When Mercy and I woke a few days later, in the dark and the stench of that terrible, rotting cellar, we did not know what we were. We were hungry, I remember that. We were starving, and we were weak, but we were not really afraid. Not even when the pitiful bits of sunlight we could get fell down on us from a grate far above, and we saw that we were surrounded by the bones and bodies of countless dead girls. That these bodies, in fact, were all that the cellar contained.
That is when we knew who had taken us.
For years and years, the local villages had a bogeyman story that few adults believed, but what was always whispered to the children—especially the girls. For there were rumors that a gentlewoman named Darcy was stealing away girls from surrounding villages. There were rumors of what happened at her castle, rumors that she was using the blood of these innocents to bathe in, that she was eating their flesh as a cannibal. So mothers and fathers would tell their daughters to be good, or Darcy would get them. We’d heard the stories ourselves, growing up, but had never, ever believed they could be true.
But we knew the truth of it now.
Darcy was a vampire.
And she had drained us dry because she wished to kill us, to drink us up and satiate her desperate lust for blood.
And that meant, since we had died and come back to ourselves with this raging hunger in our bellies, that we had become the damned, too.
Mercy and I were now vampires.
I wanted to leave that place. We knew what we were when we trembled and stumbled into the light, up and out of that cursed dungeon, alongside the crumbling stone walls of the castle, when the sunlight burned us as we stayed in it, burned us gently, but burned us nonetheless. When a deer crashed through the underbrush, and our incisors lengthened, we knew, truly, what we had become, then.
Vampires.
We followed and felled that deer and drained it dry, the two of us ripping into its warm muscles with sharp teeth, lapping at the blood like newborn kittens, unsure of how to drink. And then, full, I stood shaking and told Mercy: I wanted to leave. I asked Mercy for us both to go, for us both to run away, far away, where our parents would never see what monstrous creatures we’d become, where we might be able to start again, hidden from the world who would never understand us.
But Mercy stood there, in the woods, blood dripping down her chin, her piercing blue eyes wide and wild.
“We can not leave,” she whispered, rubbing the back of her hand over her mouth and smearing the blood. She was shaking, but not with fear.
She was shaking with rage.
“We can not leave until we stop her. She will not do this again to another girl,” said Mercy, then. “We will stop her.”
Oh, how Mercy was angry. Her life had been taken from her, her future, every possibility of happiness in the life we’d known and expected to have. We did not know at the time how much the world would change, but we did not know, at the time, what would become of us. We thought we had become damned. Cursed. That our very souls had been given to the devil in exchange for tormented immortal life. For all we knew were the stories of vampires, and we did not yet know the truth of the matter.
In all of this, we knew nothing.
But Mercy knew that we must stop Darcy.
So we went back into the dungeon, finding our way up through broken staircases and cracked doors as we rose ever higher into the castle itself, and we sought out the evil woman who had done this to us.
And we found her, about to kill another girl.
The vampire Darcy sat in one of the tall, crumbling towers that once must have been beautiful, back when this castle had been full of lords and ladies who ruled this area. Perhaps Darcy had even seen that time, for she sat before a long table in a massive dining hall as if she’d lived here her whole life, as if she was still the lady of this place. Her big black skirts billowed around her as she leaned back, gazing at the long table before her with narrowed eyes and a wickedly smiling mouth. She was the only one seated at that table, and tied to the table’s surface as if she was the main course (and indeed, she was) lay a beautiful young girl, stripped of almost all of her garments save for the chemise that had been pushed down her shoulders.
This young thing had long, brunette hair and such a pretty face, but it was contorted in horror as she screamed and screamed. But these were not cries for help. They were the desperate strains of fear, because this poor thing knew how far Darcy’s castle was away from any village or people, and she knew there was no one to hear her or save her.
No one but us.
Darcy had not been expecting us, and her coachman—her only servant—was down feeding the coach horses and bedding them down for the evening. So when we entered the room, bold as you please through the wide archway to the hall beyond and Darcy rose, standing slowly and turning her body to us, her bright blue eyes growing icy and wide and angry, she knew she was caught.
And that she was at an end.
Mercy was strong, and Mercy was angry as she strode forward so quickly, I almost didn’t see her move. It was Mercy who killed Darcy. It was savage and ghoulish, but how else do you kill a vampire other than removing its head?
Meeting Eternity (The Sullivan Vampires, Volume 1 Page 16
