by E. C. Hibbs
Apa and Anya’s faces flashed before me: his whitening hair with the natural curls above the ears; her beaming eyes and soft fingers. The smiles and sparkles warped into screams.
“What did you do to them?” I yelled. “If you’ve hurt them, I swear to God –”
They did beg for mercy. He ran the edge of a finger under my chin, and let out a sadistic chuckle. But I must confess, I doubt any being shall ever eclipse the palatability of the brown-eyed beauty from four years past.
I fought desperately, enraged tears spilling down my face. I tried to hold them back; to not allow him the satisfaction – but I wouldn’t have had any better luck trying to stem the flow of water flooding into a sinking ship. I roared at him, but no matter what I did, nothing could break his hold.
Stop resisting me, he said, ever smooth as he cupped my cheek in his hand. I must admit, were it not for the very nature of the blood in your veins, I might even be tempted to keep you. To have you as my juvenile... but that is so much more than you deserve. For as much as you are my new obsession, you will pay.
His other hand slid down my arm, and he placed two of his fingers over the underside of my wrist, digging the points of two nails into my flesh. It wasn’t hard enough to draw blood, but my heart raced. For all the times I’d dreamed of him, he’d never actually touched me. But then, I realised that for all of the nightmares I’d suffered – these ones where I actually conversed with him were different to the ones in which I seemed to be only looking in. Had he – it – come back with a vengeance after my blocking him out, more powerful than before?
He brought his face close to mine. I felt his icy breath flow over the scar on my neck, and then he was calling out, “Bee! Bee, wake up! Bee!”
I was yanked backwards like a fish being pulled to the surface, and my eyes shot open. He swirled into view, still there and bent over me, with his hands on my shoulders.
“Nem!” I shrieked, recoiling. Then I yelped as I toppled over the edge of the bed, hitting my head hard on the wall.
“Bee!” the figure cried, leaping after me. I stared as it approached and reached out gently. The fuzziness quickly dissolved away into Frank’s familiar face, his hair unkempt and eyes wide with shock. His hand took the side of my head and my chin tipped onto his arm. I saw his dragonfly tattoo close to my nose.
Then I burst into tears. Frank quickly shuffled over on his knees and pulled me towards him, gently rocking me back and forth. I heard him muttering words of comfort and asking me what was wrong, but I had no words. I clutched at his old baggy t-shirt, feeling the material becoming damp as I sobbed into it.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I cried in Hungarian, the heaving of my chest breaking it up into separate syllables. Then I found my voice again and screamed it.
“Bee!” Frank snapped, tightening his hold on me. “Calm down!”
But I didn’t listen to him. I only buried my face in his shoulder and wailed. Behind closed eyes, all I saw was the other face: eyes shining triumphantly above a smirk saturated with the redness of fresh blood.
CHAPTER XVIII
Everything and nothing was what that night was made of. Eventually, I managed to keep my voice steady enough to break the stream of Hungarian, and tell Frank what had happened. The truth hit me like a sledgehammer shattering a plank of wood, and he whisked me downstairs. I phoned every number I could think of: the house, their mobile numbers, even their personal lines at work. I didn’t get an answer from any.
So I almost dropped the handset in fright when it rang later on. I pressed the green button and held it to my ear with a shaking hand.
“Am I speaking to Miss Bianka Farkas?” a voice asked.
“Yes, who is calling?”
“This is Sergeant Wilde from the Metropolitan Police. I’m sorry to contact you at such an hour, but could you please come down to the station?”
The death-grip on my cane shuddered and I pressed my lips together so hard that I was sure they went white. The demon’s face flashed, but I forced myself to communicate, and once I’d told Frank, he hurried me to the car. On the way through the quiet streets, I didn’t say a word. I knew what was coming as I stared out into the night.
I sat in the police station, speaking with Wilde: a stocky middle-aged man wearing a shirt that was a size too small for him. I drew myself away from the situation, and it sounded as though his words were slurred, like an old tape cassette player as the batteries ran low. My body froze and I felt rooted to the spot. He spoke as though reciting from a newspaper article that had already been written.
“We got a call from the Budapest police in Újpest a few hours ago, to contact you... Your parents are Támas and Magda Farkas...? They have both been reported missing... neither of them appeared at work... Investigation pending...”
A word from Lucy’s posters echoed in my head like a struck bell. Hiányzó. Missing.
When Frank brought me home, he held me close and I let myself cry. Hot tears escaped my eyes, but I was too horrified and shocked to follow them up with voluntary sobs. I just stood there, shell-shocked.
“They might still be alright,” he tried to assure me. “He just said they’re missing. I know that’s not much of a consolation, but –”
“Nem.” I shook my head. The flaming eyes burned into me. And that was all I could say, as I replayed the dream over and over.
I knew it was a different type of dream to just seeing him, without his awareness of me. In those, I felt like some kind of intruder, viewing something that perhaps he didn’t want me to see – or perhaps didn’t even know I was seeing. But where we actually spoke lucidly, it was as though he wanted to make sure I would listen, and remember. There wasn’t just torment. There was method.
Frank must have known they weren’t just missing too, because he didn’t say anything else. He only sat with me and held me until the morning. He occasionally made me a cup of tea and murmured soft condolences, but more than anything, he kept silent, and I tried to take a vague comfort from his arms around me. But they seemed so distant, like the kind of strange, numb pain that I might have associated with a phantom limb. I imagined an arm or a leg separate from me, but still being able to feel it, somehow, in the thin air. Frank’s voice was garbled, as though I was being held underwater and a film of ice was creeping over the surface above me.
No trace.
The same thing had been said of Lucy, when she hadn’t come home. There must have been so many who had never come home, and been attached to that notion.
The grey mist descended and held me like a net. I repeated the statement, trying to get it to sink in. That I was an orphan. That both of my parents, my beloved Anya and Apa, were dead. That their bodies – beyond pale and drained dry – would never be found or laid to rest. I watched the days flow by without missing them, staring with dead eyes at my life as it walked separately by my side; as it huddled, injured and broken, in a corner of the room.
Frank managed to negotiate a week off work for me, and whilst he went to the Museum, I wandered the house like some kind of crippled ghost. I stood in the middle of the living room holding my pocketknife, inspecting the blade and the words along the hilt. Memories of me standing in my girl guides uniform came back, with my freshly-cut hair and bright child eyes. A few weeks before I was due to go on my first camp trip; Apa presented me with the knife after I’d successfully sung the whole of Himnusz: the national anthem. I saw the dining table on my left; the curtains open onto the garden as evening drew in. My plate lay abandoned as I stood up and burst into song. Anya and Apa watched – with a look of pride and slight amusement on their faces. The words – in my terrible, screechy nine-year old voice – filled the room, and my mind.
“O, my God, the Magyar bless
With Thy plenty and good cheer!
With Thine aid his just cause press,
Where his foes to fight appear.
Fate, who for so long did’st frown,
Bring him happy times and ways;<
br />
Atoning sorrow hath weighed down
Sins of past and future days.”
I gritted my teeth; and then put all of my weight on my left leg, threw my cane to the floor so I could switch the knife to my stronger hand, and hurled it across the room with all my might. There was a sharp bang as it crashed into the wall, the open blade tearing the paper before hitting the floor. I didn’t care. I didn’t even care if Frank would notice.
I accidentally moved back onto my right leg and it buckled under me. There was a yelp as I went down, but that made me even more livid. I screamed, letting out all of the anguish, until my throat burned like I’d gone for months without blood. Another ounce of rage built at that. Inside, I bellowed out, is there nothing left in my life that belongs solely to me, as my choice?
The thought escaped in a tangled roar of Hungarian, and I completely lost myself. My eyes shone red and I grabbed my cane, slamming it into the floor like a baseball bat. The rubber tip at the end bounced as it hit the carpet, and the shock reverberated back up my arm. My leg stayed sprawled underneath me until I eventually collapsed onto my side, eyes glazed and distant.
Relapse, anyone?
The greyness that I saw became the norm as autumn blew away and winter began to settle in. On the streets, jackets were replaced by thick coats, and the shop windows were full of warm jumpers and woolly hats. For the first time since Frank had brought me back from Hyde Park, I took to wearing my old blue scarf.
I soon returned to work, and everybody there was on hand to offer their support. Frank tried to make it easier by speaking for me sometimes, by telling the truth in that my parents had disappeared. That way, there would be less hovering over the fact that both of them had died at the same time, in unknown circumstances, at quite young ages. No; better to bend it slightly and say that they were missing, like what anybody else would know.
I sat and stared at the fire flickering in the grate. The logs in there were birch, and had been flaming ever since last month, stoked up whenever they burned low. When I’d moved in, Frank had lined every room with birch twigs, and an incense stick was lit every day. I knew in my gut that I was safer with him – safer than I could have ever hoped to be on my own – but he’d still done it for me. The whole house had been subjected to it, for me. I didn’t know whether he did it to help me keep my own piece of mind and not break something that I’d incorporated into my life for years – or because he was nervous too, about what exactly we were dealing with.
He’d told me I was to always to make that distinction whenever I thought about things; that just saying that it was my burden was wrong. He had turned around and said to me, “you’ve been on your own for too long. And I want you to know that I will never do what he did. I will never leave you, and I will never, ever hurt you.”
Sometimes, I closed my eyes and found myself wishing that, in some ways, he hadn’t found me. Especially after we discovered what had happened with Apa and Anya. I thought, I’ve lost too many people close to me. I didn’t want him to join them, and disappear, with no trace. I told him how concerned I was, and he just took me by the hands and looked into my eyes.
“Bianka, you stop worrying about me,” he’d said firmly. “Listen to me, and let me tell you something that you should know. I can take care of myself. When it comes down to physical strength, harmless vampires are always – always – stronger than demons. If the two of us had a face-off like that, if I got my hands on him, then I would crush him.”
I’d just looked at him, and remembered how the Lidérc had never needed physical strength to overpower me or anyone else. As soon as his black eyes settled on you, then you were bent to him, by sheer will alone. It wasn’t brute force – or anything at all physical – that had pinned me ten feet off the floor, or flung me across the room, or forced a blade into my back. Frank kept quiet about that part for a reason: because he knew too, that even though he as a harmless might be stronger muscle-wise, the Lidérc would always have the upper hand when he was out of arm’s range.
“And even if I wasn’t a vampire,” Frank had added, more softly; “I wouldn’t let that stop me from driving a stake through his chest for all he’s done to you.”
CHAPTER XIX
“I’m going to tell you everything,” I said one evening in late October. Frank looked over at me from where he was bent down in front of the DVD player, pressing a disc of Hong Kong Phooey back into its case.
“What?”
I swallowed, and twiddled my thumbs anxiously. “I’m going to tell you everything that happened to me four years ago,” I repeated, slowing my voice down so it would help me to process it, as well as him. “I think I should, now. I should have told you ages ago, but I just wasn’t ready. I mean... there’s so much to tell.”
Frank kicked the case over towards the blanket chest, and then came back to sit next to me. “No, I understand completely,” he said gently, and I immediately knew that he did. “You can tell me anything. You can trust me, you know that, right?”
I nodded. “Alright,” I whispered, more to myself than him, getting myself ready. I felt the details coming back to the surface like magma boiling up in a volcano. My hand closed around the shaft of my cane, and I glanced up at the panoramas hanging on the chimney breast before turning back to him.
“On my eighteenth birthday, I spent the evening with my best friend. Her name was Lucy Denborough. She was from London; she was the friend I was telling you about who used to live here, when we had that meal in Soho.”
“Yes, I remember you mentioned her,” Frank said. “So that was her name. Lucy.”
I bit my lip, and cut it. Growling in frustration, I snatched a tissue from a box on the windowsill behind us and covered my mouth. But I continued, even though my words were muffled. I was determined not to stop now that I’d started.
“Yes. Well, she mentioned to me that she’d begun to see... a man. I thought that he was a stalker, or something; and I tried to get her to stay the night, but she decided to go home and... and she never made it. She disappeared.” I swallowed, and Frank’s arm curled around my shoulders in comfort.
“It was him, wasn’t it?” he finished for me. “The demon?”
“Yes.”
He paused for a moment. “What happened?”
I took a quick sip of tea, wincing as it flowed over my lip. “I was actually the one who found her. She was trapped in this crypt, under a mausoleum in an old cemetery near my house.” I shuddered. “She looked... horrendous, Frank. I couldn’t believe what he’d done to her.”
I didn’t have to say anything more about that. I could tell from the look in his eyes that he could picture it.
“That was the first time I saw him,” I carried on. “I was so desperate to get her out; I tried to exchange myself for her. But it didn’t work... I thought he was going to kill me, the way he looked at me. But I did manage to get her out when the sun rose, and the cockerel crowed, and I hid her in my house for a day... but he found us that night. He came back for us.”
I closed my eyes, and saw it all happen again. I heard Lucy scream my name, as the knife sunk into me. My face hit the carpet. “He killed her.”
Frank cast his eyes down to the floor, and I could see that he was piecing the fragments of all I was telling him together, with everything he already knew from my past. His lips were pressed into a contemptuous line.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered after what seemed like an age. “That’s so terrible. I... I don’t know what else to say, Bee. I’m so sorry.”
I managed a small smile. A tiny droplet of blood escaped and I quickly caught it with the tissue before it could run down my chin.
“Did he hurt you, too?”
I tapped my cane softly. “He stabbed me in the back with my pocketknife to weaken me, so he could finish me off in the hospital later.”
“What, your pocketknife?” Frank said. “That one?” He pointed to it, resting on the table beside me. I glanced fleetingly at its red
, white and green hilt.
“Yes,” I sighed. “And that was it.”
Frank frowned. “What do you mean, that was it? When did he turn you?”
“In the hospital.”
He shifted his weight. “Hang on. There’s one thing I honestly don’t understand, Bee.”
I looked at him. “What’s that?”
He spoke slowly, as though choosing his words with care, and placed a hand over mine. “All of that is just... dreadful. I never would’ve thought that things would have happened like that – it’s terrible that your friend was involved. But, I honestly can’t see any kind of way that you could have possibly given your permission to be turned in any of those contexts. Is that what you meant by an exchange? Did he trick you: become a juvenile to save Lucy?”
I shook my head. “No. He would never have let her go. I could see it in his eyes. Otherwise, why go through all the trouble of coming back for her?”
Frank ran his tongue over his lips. “And what did you say to him?”
“Well, at one point, he told me that a nerve had been severed in my back, so I could look at it – him killing me – as a favour or something, because I’d never be able to walk again, at least not without a cane. And I said I’d have that any day, as long as I could still hold one.” I couldn’t help but chuckle under my breath. “That was before. Then I punched him, and he told me that he hadn’t come to kill me that night. Said it was too easy – more or less.”
Even though I could tell he was hanging on my every word, I noticed Frank’s eyes suddenly gleam in bemusement.
“You punched a demon?” he repeated, a smile playing at the corners of his lips. “You weren’t even turned, and you managed to punch a full demon?”
“I was as surprised as you are,” I admitted.
