Le Remède

by Densie Webb

  “When I entered the sitting room, Danielle was backing away from her. I lunged and when I did, she took Danielle by the shoulders, turned her to face me and in a single move, snapped Danielle’s swan-like neck. Black despair burned my throat as I listened to the sound of her cracking bones and watched her body drop like a stone.

  “Phillipe’s face turned deadly pale as his mother crumpled to the floor. Screaming as only a child can, he ran to me for protection. I gathered him in my arms and rushed to the front door. My mind was unfocused, and my head threatened to implode, but I had to escape. I had to save Phillipe. I was certain I could outrun this diminutive woman.

  “A sudden blow to my head stopped me in my tracks. I stumbled and righted myself. In my dazed state, she grabbed Phillipe by the arm, jerking him away from me as if he were a cloth doll. As he flew from my arms, he screamed, ‘Aidez moi, Papa!’ his little hands reaching for me, grasping the air. Ignoring his shrieks, she dangled him in front of me, waiting for me to regain my balance. When her eyes met mine, I was paralyzed, unable to lift my arms, my feet plastered to the floor.

  “I could do nothing but wait for Danielle’s fate to become his, but she had something more horrific in mind for my child. She drew him into her arms, stroked his trembling cheek and then, like an animal devouring its prey, dug her teeth into his neck. The darkened stream of blood dribbled from the corners of her mouth and the primal, satisfied sounds she made filled me with disgust and black despair. I couldn’t comprehend what was happening, my inability to save my son, but when she looked away, I was released.

  “I lowered my shoulders and ran at her with all my might. But even as she held a whimpering Phillipe in one hand, her mouth clamped on his neck, as he took his last breath, she halted me with her free hand. I watched helplessly as the life force drained from my beautiful boy’s eyes…my beautiful boy.”

  Andie’s face is painted in broad strokes of grief. Tears streak her cheeks. She looks at me with such sorrow but says nothing. I wish to cut our connection just long enough to tell my story and prevent her from reliving my pain.

  “I felt my mind escaping my body, losing the will to live, but she simply mocked my human frailty and growled, ‘You are mine now.’ She cast Phillipe’s body aside as if it were a soiled handkerchief. ‘Only mine. You will embrace your new life and come to care for me.’ At that moment, I knew not what she had in store for me, only that my life was over.

  “They say that grief is the price we pay for love. As this creature stood before me, with her poisonous smile, her dead eyes, the brutal realization rendered me catatonic—I had just paid an exorbitant price for my brief time with the rarest of love.”

  Chapter 36

  Andie

  He stops his story and looks at me before continuing. It’s as if he’s checking in, checking if I’m still listening, checking if I believe him, checking if I can take any more. I’m listening, feeling everything. But believing? I believe he’s grieving. I believe he’s tortured. But most disturbing of all, I believe he believes his story.

  “It was later that she stopped the beating of my heart, but the deaths of Phillipe and Danielle— and the child growing in her womb—were undoubtedly when I died. I eventually learned the source of her unstable, vindictive behavior; her husband’s farm had been on the verge of bankruptcy and he had asked—no, begged—Papa for a loan, which he had provided.

  “But her husband’s poor business sense rendered him unable to repay the debt and he was thrown into debtor’s prison. She was left scrounging and begging on the streets to feed her four children. Her bitter vengeance turned deadly only after she had become a Kindred and decided the deepest cut to my father would be to destroy me and my family.”

  If he had said his family had contracted the Ebola virus, been struck by lightning, or drowned in a Chilean tsunami, I might have believed him. But this? Maybe his version of how this tragedy happened is a product of his delusion, but the loss, the sorrow, the guilt of whatever happened to his wife and child is real. That much is clear. And it’s pushed him over the edge.

  And I can so easily relate. When my parents died, grief dug its curled talons into my flesh and refused to let go. Unless you’ve experienced it, no one can explain the emptiness, that hopeless feeling of freefalling into a black hole of space and time. The feeling that you will never be whole again. That you are somehow to blame. I understand the conjoined emotions of grief and guilt all too well.

  He locks eyes with me. “Sometimes it feels like it was yesterday—but the year was 1865.”

  His final words are like swallowing a stone. “Vincent, let me help you. I can make sure you get the help you need.”

  “Andie, before you pass judgment, allow me to finish the telling. I haven’t yet shared how I came to be—what I am.”

  “I’ll listen to the rest of your story if—you let me help you.” I’m already formulating a mental health plan for his recovery. He nods in agreement, pauses and goes back to his story.

  “When she was done with Phillipe, I was ready to die by her hand. If she had left me unharmed at that moment I would have taken my own life. ‘Be done with it,’ I told her. But I was still ignorant of what she wanted of me. Her countenance changed to what I had seen when she had approached me before. A sweet expression that hit a sharp false note.

  “‘Vincent, darling,’ she said, ‘don’t you understand? I will gift you with immortality and you will be my mine. You will do my bidding and within one hundred days and one hundred nights, you will learn to accept what you are and come to love me. Only me. And you will be by my side forever.’

  “All this talk of immortality, acceptance and love, as she casually stepped over the lifeless bodies of my wife and child to make her way to me, caused me to retch violently. The room reeked of fear, death, and the vile scent she had brought into my home. I grabbed a fire poker, ready to end my own life, but she was too quick. She grabbed the poker from my hand, flung it across the room and it crashed on Danielle’s piano keys, creating a grisly sound.

  “ ‘No, Vincent,’ she said with an unsettling calm. ‘Only I will end your human existence.’ With that prelude, she leaned over me. I felt her icy breath on my neck and I welcomed the piercing pain that followed as a sign of my imminent death, my release. But it wasn’t the death I prayed for.”

  As I listen to him embellish on his already bizarre tale, I’m not sure whether to laugh, cry, or run screaming from the room. Any one of them would be an appropriate response.

  “When I came to, I was changed into what you see. Not dead, but not truly alive. She wanted me to be her prisoner, her slave—her lover. I feared that I would be compelled to stay with her, but before one hundred days had passed, I ran, certain I could survive on my own and avoid detection—one of the most important lessons she had shared with me. I absconded with a few pieces of jewelry to sell if I was in need of cash.

  “I never laid eyes on her again.”

  He pauses, absorbed in thought, before he looks at me and says, “For decades, my senses ruled me, but I eventually taught myself to survive without killing and I have stayed true to that for over one-hundred years.”

  He just confessed that he was (is?) a killer. I feel myself going under for the third time and no one is here to throw me a lifeline.

  “Her intent was to make me in her likeness, but I was never like her.”

  The contents of my stomach rise in my throat; I swallow hard and take a trembling breath. I feel my disbelief morphing into doubt and I’m unsure of either.

  “I never did what she did. I never taunted my victims. Never made their families watch. I mourned each and every one and I still do to this day. Now, I take as little as I can from them, only what I need, erase their memories of me, and they go on with their lives.”

  “You erase what?”

  “Kindred possess the ability to erase human memories. It’s one of the keys to our survival. Discovery would result in something akin to a Salem witch hunt, culmi
nating in a mass funeral pyre.”

  “Exactly how many like you do you think there are?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Thousands? Tens of thousands?”

  I begin to cry hysterically.

  Chapter 37

  Vincent

  The retelling has left me raw and her exhausted. This is the first time in one-hundred-fifty years that I have shared the entire story—every sickening detail—with anyone. And in doing so, I have completely destroyed her sense of safety and sanity. But, even after the recounting of my loss, my deeds, Andie has not yet reached that moment of dread, when humans fully fathom that there are indeed things that go bump in the night existing alongside them. And then it is too late.

  As I laid bare my soul to her, confessing the awful things I have done to survive, I sensed a trace of revulsion behind her veneer of disbelief. She can only feel revulsion if she imagines it to be true.

  She shakes her head repeatedly, rhythmically as she wipes her tears.

  “No. No. It’s not true. It can’t be true,” she says, unable to look me in the eye. But I see the wheels turning as she makes a valiant effort to line up the facts I have presented with logic she has lived by for twenty-six years.

  Her despair is now mine. Despair over what could have been, over what I wish I could undo, over what I wish I could do over. I want to take her in my arms, comfort her, make this all go away and release her from this fated connection. But that is not an option. For either of us.

  I keep my distance. “Andie believe me when I say I know how difficult this is to accept. I was once like you, unable to imagine that such things existed. My acceptance was forced upon me with no preamble, no forewarning, no preparation. My only proof was my own transformation.”

  She finally looks at me, her eyes drenched in heartbreak.

  I go to the closet and remove a lace kerchief from a drawer and bring it to her. Sitting beside her, I reveal its contents—an assortment of jewelry, unpolished, darkened with age—a copper and ruby bracelet, an opal and diamond necklace, a rose-cut diamond engagement ring, a brooch—items from both before and after my life was destroyed.

  “These are the pieces that remain from my previous life and from—her. I know it might seem strange that I would keep them, but I’ve held on to them so I never forget that my life before was real and joyful and to remind me of the path I was forced to take, so that I never go there again.”

  She peers into the monogrammed kerchief, frowning. She looks at me, then back at the jewelry laid out on the bed.

  Her face is ashen. She points to the brooch. “Vincent, where did you get this?”

  “It belonged to the woman—the creature—that changed me.”

  She runs her fingers over the lace of the kerchief and swallows audibly. “What was her name?”

  I have no desire to say her name aloud and I haven’t, not since the day I left. “Why would you want to know that?”

  “Vincent, just tell me her name!”

  “Her name was Aurelia Galland.”

  Chapter 38

  Andie

  He says her name and, like invisible ink on the page, seconds pass before his words materialize. I’m lightheaded, my head strapped into a Tilt-A-Whirl. I blink to refocus. Removing the brooch from its nesting place, I gently run my fingers over the emerald flower embedded into the gold filigree. Questions run through my exhausted brain. Why does he have it? Where did he get it? What does it mean?

  What does it mean? What does it mean?

  I need a sign that I haven’t been sucked into his grim fantasy.

  “Vincent, that can’t be; that’s my…”

  “Your what?”

  I take a breath before I utter the next words

  “Aurelia Galland was my ancestor’s name,” I say as I hold up in the brooch. “I have a photograph of her wearing this exact same brooch.” Even as I say it out loud, even as I see the unease in his eyes, even though the evidence is right here in front of me, I don’t believe it; I can’t believe it.

  He’s staring at me, but I can no longer read his expression. Maybe it’s his turn not to believe. He stands and takes a step back. “You have a photograph? Of her? Andie, I must see it.”

  I mentally flip through the countless genealogy documents I’ve pored over. It’s like trying to work a Rubik’s cube. I hear the clicking in my head, twisting the facts this way and that. But no matter how I turn it, when one side lines up, the rest refuse to fall into place.

  Then it hits me. Of course. He saw my genealogy papers on the table in my apartment and simply inserted her name into his story. I get angrier by the second that he’s playing this twisted game with me and, even more, that I almost fell for it.

  But—even if he rifled through my papers and inserted her name into his tale, that doesn’t explain away this very real brooch, which I’m holding so tightly in my hand the filigree is cutting into my skin. Maybe it’s all just a really weird coincidence and it only looks like the one in the photograph.

  “Are you feeling well enough for us to go to your apartment to see the photograph?” I’m so deep in thought, Vincent’s voice surprises me.

  “Now? Are you serious?”

  “I must have confirmation. Andie, please set aside your doubts and consider the facts—the possibilities. How could I have gotten the exact same brooch? It’s an antique, over a century old. I’ve never seen another one like it. Have you?”

  No one could blame me for my reluctance to open this door to an alternate universe, full of mythical, blood-swigging creatures. But I have no more words to debate this. I swing my legs around to the edge of the bed, stand up and check my balance, before trampling over the splintered door laying on the floor and turn back to him.

  “So, are you coming or what?”

  ****

  As I slide the key in the lock, Mack opens the door and I almost enter the apartment face down.

  “Andie, there you are! I’ve been worried about you.” She hugs me and tenderly brushes the hair from my face, just like my mother used to do. Mack’s warm presence and her concern for my well-being offer an escape from my inner turmoil, allowing me to put aside, for a brief moment, the reality of why we’re here.

  It makes me wish I could turn back the clock to a better time. But to when? To before my interview? To before Lizzie Borden’s? To before I walked into The Black Orchid? Before choosing to meet Mack at The Bloody Mug? Or maybe before I slept with him—that’s the moment when everything changed.

  Mack offers Vincent a cursory greeting—a nod, a tight smile, and death-ray eyes. Her right eyebrow is raised in a question and she’s giving me a “what the hell is he doing here” look. She glances at him, then at me and back at him again.

  Was it just yesterday morning I was crying on her shoulder over our breakup? It doesn’t seem possible. How can a person’s entire belief system be shattered in less than twenty-four hours? When you get involved with someone like Vincent, that’s how.

  Chester lurks in the background at the breakfast table, clearly unsure of his role in this awkward scene. His beard and his hair are trimmed closer than the last time I saw him, highlighting his neck tattoo. He’s sprouted sideburns and his porkpie hat rests comfortably on his head. He stands to his full five-foot-eight. Vincent towers over him. I’m being sucked into a black hole of confusion as my two worlds collide.

  “It’s nine-thirty. Why aren’t you at work?” she asks, pulling me out just in time, but she doesn’t give me time to answer. “Oh, hon, you really don’t look good. Promise me you’ll go to the doctor. Soon.”

  “I promise.” I may feel better, but my face, my body, my heart, carry the residual effects of what I’ve been through over the last few days, the last few hours.

  “You sure you’re okay?” She looks at Vincent again.

  “I’ll make sure she gets to the doctor,” he says.

  “Yeah, well, you’re the reason she feels so crappy,” she says, wedging herself in the space bet
ween us.

  “Mack, it’s okay. Really.”

  “You sure you don’t want me to stay? Chester won’t mind, will you, babe?”

  He nods. “Totally cool.” I’m so glad she has Chester, now that…now that I don’t know what the hell will happen next.

  “Vincent and I need to talk.”

  She hesitates, clicks her tongue. “Okay, but you call or text me if you need anything,” she says, looking at me intently, silently sending the message that she’ll beat the crap out of Vincent if he does anything to make me feel bad.

  “Seriously, Mack, everything is fine. Now go!”

  She hugs me again and whispers in my ear, “We’ll talk later.” She readjusts the purse on her shoulder, pats her hair down and blows me a kiss, as she and Chester leave, shutting the door to my other life, my normal life.

  I miss her, and it, already.

  I’m not sure how long I’ve been staring at the closed door when Vincent touches my shoulder. Once again, the sensation washes over me—an incongruous combination of feeling like I’ve OD’d on Ritalin and I’m floating in a warm saltwater pool with the sounds of the ocean’s tide washing over me.

  “Andie, the photograph?”

  I turn around; he looks so vulnerable. For the first time he’s the one who’s anxious, insecure.

  “It’s over here,” I say as I point to the table with the scattered piles of genealogy folders, just as I left them. I walk to the table and begin to go through them one by one, trying to remember which one contains the photograph. Vincent’s expression hasn’t changed and he’s still planted in the exact same spot by the door as if he’s positioned for a quick escape.

  “You’re making me nervous. Can you please just come and sit down?” I can’t believe I’m asking him to have a seat as if everything is normal.