I paused a moment before setting him free. Admiring him, yes, but also because vampires are not generally social creatures. They like their privacy and I have known them to kill one another on sight if they feel that their territory is being encroached upon. I generally cultivated a live and let live attitude about others I have met. I did not know if the vampire in front of me felt likewise.
“I understand your hesitation,” he said to me, as though he could hear my thoughts. “But I assure you I have no fight with you. In fact, if you untie me I think I might owe you a debt I can never repay.”
I mentally kicked myself for even hesitating. He had saved my life by cutting my wrists free and here I was debating whether or not I should let him loose. I unfastened the straps holding him, starting at the neck and working my way down. “I think we can call ourselves even at this point,” I said, taking a few steps back as he swung his legs around and gracefully slipped off the table to the floor.
With him on his feet, I could see that he was significantly taller than me; perhaps six feet three inches. He outweighed me by quite a few pounds as well, though none of it was fat. He brushed a hand down the front of his pants to smooth a few wrinkles. He looked as composed as if he had been attending a dinner party for the past several hours rather than being strapped to a dissecting table awaiting his own death. He made no move to attack me, nor did I think he would. While I had no real reason to, I trusted him.
I pointed to the unconscious form of Brad on one side of the room. “That one is yours,” I said, then jerked a thumb at Natasha, huddled in the opposite corner. “The Goth bitch is mine.”
“Bon appetit,” he said. It was a ridiculous comment, but he said it with a completely straight face. The incongruity of the statement with our circumstances struck me as irresistibly funny and I laughed out loud.
I was still laughing as I broke Natasha’s neck and tore her head from her body.
A promise is a promise.
CHAPTER 16
When Natasha was dry and I could draw no more blood from her, I let her body fall to the floor without further molestation despite the original assertion of my intentions. The threat had been made at a time I felt my life was about to end and therefore I had been a bit overdramatic. Furthermore, I have no real proclivities toward necrophilia.
Satisfied, I stood and conducted a general assessment of my condition. The wounds in my chest and on my right arm had closed and were healing nicely. Physically, I felt fit and even somewhat refreshed from my recent meal. I had to admit my appearance, though, remained a bit disheveled. My shirt was torn in several places and it hung loose and wet on me. Blood covered my face and my clothing; some of it mine and some of it Nat’s. There wasn’t much I could do about that, but all the same I pulled off my shirt and wiped at the sticky mess on my face and chest to clean up as best I could.
Turning to face Niven, I saw that he too had finished with his meal. However, unlike me, the magnificent bastard was still immaculate. Seeing the mess I had made of myself apparently amused him and he smiled, revealing long white fangs. I blinked in surprise. I hadn’t noticed them earlier, but now four glistening canine teeth extended easily an inch beyond the others in his mouth. My own teeth had grown quite sharp in the past few years, but they still appeared more or less normal from a distance. Niven’s jaws were the stuff of vampire lore.
“You are quite the messy eater,” Niven commented, observing the wadded up shirt in my hand and my blood-covered appearance.
“At times, yeah,” I agreed, sheepishly. Then looking pointedly at his mouth, I said, “And that is quite the dental work you’re sporting.”
“Oh, sorry,” he stated, looking embarrassed. He closed his mouth and furrowed his brows, appearing briefly like he was trying to concentrate on a particularly difficult math equation. When he opened his mouth and smiled again a moment later, the fangs were gone.
My mouth fell open for the second time that night. Where had they gone? I knew I hadn’t imagined them. And they had looked quite real, so I didn’t think he had swallowed them. I didn’t see him take them out of his mouth either. To add to my confusion, a glance at his hand showed that the nails that had cut my bonds earlier were also now gone. I was about to ask him about it, but he spoke first.
“We should be going. I don’t know if they have any friends that know what they are up to, but I do not want someone checking up on them and finding us here.”
Reluctantly I agreed, so I let the questions in my head drop unasked. Instead I pointed to the body on the floor next to Niven. “Brad,” I said.
Niven glanced down. “Yes. Brad. What about him?”
“Um, if his coat isn’t too damaged or messy, I’ll take it. He looks about my size and I think I might be a little less conspicuous outside if I wear it.”
My new acquaintance – he told me his name was Niven, but I don’t believe that name to be any more real than the name I gave him to call me – not only proved to be no threat to me, but he turned out to be a better friend than I had any right to hope for.
That night, when he learned that I was a visitor in town Niven explained that he lived locally and offered to let me stay with him through the following day, or longer if I so chose. I accepted his offer, although I asked him to join me on a detour to my hotel first to reclaim my belongings. I desperately wanted to wash up and put on a new shirt. I kind of liked Brad’s jacket, though, and I resolved to keep it. It was a nice accent to my wardrobe as well as a reminder not to be so stupid in the future. Niven was already dressed, having reclaimed his own gray, button-up shirt from the living room as we exited the would-be killers’ house.
Niven kept a home in Bloomington, I won’t say where, but it was not too far from where the pair of us had been held captive. His home was a small one-story residence sitting on a two-acre lot. The main space of the house was clean and homey, immaculately furnished and maintained, but completely unlived in. The structure in reality was no more than a façade, covering and concealing the secrets of its owner from any curious neighbors. The actual occupied living space was two levels of rooms located below ground level. Behind a series of bookshelves in the main-floor sitting room, Niven had constructed a concealed stairway that led down to his true home: a warren of fully furnished rooms including a library, a den with a fully stocked bar, and three separate bathrooms. The bathrooms each had a shower stall and a deep sloping bathtub. One of the bathrooms had a tub large enough to hold three or more people and it reminded me of the black marble bathtub in Andi’s house. I immediately pushed that thought out of my head. It was not a memory worth dwelling over. And of course, no mirrors hung in any part of the living quarters. Almost three thousand square feet of space had been carved into the ground beneath the main house.
In addition to comfort, the living space had been designed with an eye for security. Solid wood doors and steel barriers that could be secured only from the inside had been installed to separate the above ground residence from the spaces below. No one could gain entry without Niven’s permission. Even if the house above burned to the ground in the middle of the day, Niven would be safe in his shelter below, unmolested and untouched by the light. I was thoroughly impressed by his ingenuity, and I told him so. It was a brilliant layout. One I vowed to myself to duplicate when I had the time to devote to such a massive project.
With both of us having fed recently, we had several hours of the evening yet to pass with no need to hunt, and with no real desire to go out again we settled ourselves in his roomy, but still very cozy, den. Each of us selected and relaxed into our own large, black leather recliner, facing one other from opposite sides of the room. Between us, on the north wall of the room, was an unlit fireplace. During the winter months, Niven explained, he would build cheery warm fires and the smoke would feed upward into the main chimney of the house, adding to the realistic appearance of the above ground façade. Tonight was comfortably warm and there was no need for a fire, so the hearth remained dark.
“Thank you again for the offer of a place to stay today,” I said.
He waved a hand dismissively at me, sending the cigar smoke swirling in eddies above his head. “Absolutely the least I could do after you saved my life.”
“I told you before, I think we’re even on that scale. I would be dead, too, if you hadn’t cut those straps off of me.” I cocked my head at him as an earlier thought reoccurred to me. “By the way,” I asked, “If I’m not prying into any state secrets, what did you cut them with? I never saw a knife, but you certainly laid my arm open easily enough.” I held up my right arm and pulled the sleeve of Brad’s leather jacket down. The cuts were long healed, however, and only three fading red lines remained. I knew these too would soon be completely gone. “I thought for a minute that you used your fingernails, but later I saw that I was wrong.”
Niven took a long drag on his cigar and attempted to blow a smoke ring. It was a miserable effort resulting in more of a round cloud than anything else. He watched it dissipate in front of him for a moment before meeting my eyes once more. Raising his right hand in front of his face, he showed me four, long black fingernails. Each extended several inches from the tips of his fingers. As he turned his hand to allow me to admire them, the light glinted from them as it bounced off of their smooth polished surfaces. They all looked wickedly sharp. I could easily see them cutting through straps of leather and the softer flesh of my arm. The problem was that I knew they had not been there a moment before. I think I would have noticed four dagger-sharp nails on his hand as he lit his cigar.
“Where the hell did those come from?” I shouted from surprise.
“From the same place the teeth did,” he answered, opening his mouth to display the dangerous canines he had sported earlier that night while feeding on our late captor.
“How do you do that?” I made no attempt to hide my giddy delight at the demonstration. I was amazed by this little trick of his, but more importantly I wanted to know if this was something I could learn to do as well. Was this an ability all vampire had, or just Niven?
He laughed at me and I watched the teeth and nails melt away as though they had never existed. “Am I to take it from your reaction that this is something you have not yet figured out how to do?”
“I didn’t even know it could be done, much less how I might be able to accomplish it myself,” I told him honestly. “Though if you’re willing to tell me, I’d love to know the secret.”
Niven again waved a dismissive hand at me. “There is no secret. Vampires are shape shifters. We can alter our form at will. Within limits,” he amended. “The older they are the more adept vampires seem to be at this manipulation. I have only been dead about thirty years and so have only really been able to alter my teeth – which I must say has made feeding much easier – and the nails of my hands. I have also had some limited success altering my face, but I have not yet learned to mimic another person’s appearance. I have known older vampires that could look at a person and duplicate their features enough to fool the victim’s own mother. I have even heard of very ancient vampires that could completely change form; shape shifting into the form of a wolf or other animal, although I have not actually seen it with my own eyes.”
“How?” I asked. “How do you make the change?”
“I really don’t know how to describe it for you,” he said to me with a shrug. He took another long pull on the cigar and exhaled as he thought about how to answer my question. “It’s kind of like learning to wiggle your ears,” he said finally. “You have to figure it out for yourself. You have to discover what works for you by trial and error. Once you figure that out, keep practicing until it becomes second nature.”
Niven shifted forward in his chair, setting his cigar in the ashtray balanced on the arm next to him. “Try this,” he said holding his left hand open, palm out toward me. He used the index finger of his right hand to touch each of his outstretched finger tips. One after the other he tapped the tops of his fingers on the raised hand.
I mimicked his actions, wondering if he was trying to teach me something or if he might just be playing a cruel game with me.
He must have seen the doubt in my expression because he paused in his motion and chuckled quietly. “I’m trying to help, but feel free to ignore my suggestion. You aren’t the first vampire I’ve met that didn’t know how to do this.”
I continued to tap my open hand. “No. Please keep going.”
“Okay,” he said, once more starting the tapping sequence on his own hand. “Think carefully about what you feel each time you touch the tops of your fingers. Focus on the edge of each fingernail and what it feels like at the moment of contact. What is the sensation that moves down your hand and your arm?”
Fingertip to fingertip, I concentrated on the sensations of touch; the slight jarring impact followed by the momentary brush of skin against skin. Working from index finger to pinkie and back again. One, two, three, four. Four, three, two, one.
“Now, move your hand down half an inch. Keep your finger moving across your hand but stop where your fingertips used to be, not where they are now.” Niven’s right hand continued to bounce over each of the fingers of his extended left hand, but this time his right index finger stopped about half of an inch away from touching.
“Think about what it felt like when you were actually touching and try to make that feeling happen again.” As he talked, the fingernails of his left hand grew longer until they were once again being touched by each movement of his right index finger.
I copied his actions and willed my fingernails to grow. I strained mentally, screwing my face up in concentration while attempting to duplicate Niven’s example, but despite my best efforts my nails remained unremarkably short. After several minutes and multiple attempts, I sighed and looked at Niven in defeat.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. He had gone back to his formerly reclined position and had reclaimed his cigar. “It didn’t come easy for me either. It will just take a little time and work to figure it out.”
“I suppose so.” I tried one last time out of simple stubbornness, but failed again. I filed this lesson away to resume later.
Slumping back into my chair, I asked him, “So, if you can do this, why didn’t you just cut yourself free before I got there?”
Niven shrugged again, trying to look unconcerned, but he did appear a bit embarrassed by my question. “I couldn’t,” he said. “The straps on the table held my hands at an odd angle. I couldn’t get enough slack where they held my wrists to cut myself free. Believe me, I tried. If you hadn’t come along and confused them with your whole toxic blood story, I think I would be quite dead right now. I must say that was some quick thinking.”
It was my turn to look embarrassed.
“I was just trying to buy some time. I thought that would at least slow them down, but I have to admit I was also hoping they might just let me go.” I realized how naïve that sounded, so I decided to change the subject. “Where am I sleeping, today?”
“That’s up to you,” Niven answered. “I have two spare rooms. You are welcome to either, whichever you find more comfortable. Or, if you prefer, I would gladly share my bed with you.”
The statement took me momentarily aback. I hadn’t expected such a forthright proposal, although I recalled Nat’s dismissive comment earlier that night: ‘apparently he likes the boys.’ Apparently, Niven did indeed prefer boys. I smiled, hoping it looked casual.
“No thank you. I appreciate the offer, but you’re not really my type.”
“Of course,” he answered, looking at me appraisingly. Then he added, “You looked startled. Does my suggestion bother you?”
I thought about his question for a moment. I never considered myself homophobic, however I definitely preferred the softer gender in my bed. And after subsisting for the past few years on the blood of others, I certainly couldn’t claim any moral high ground over the way he chose to live his life.
But I had to confess, at least to myself, that his suggestion had actually shocked and panicked me for a moment. Perhaps that was because it had been so unexpected. Or maybe I was just afraid that when I turned him down he would change his mind about letting me stay.
“No, I can’t say it bothers me,” I said, finally. “Not really. It did catch me off guard, though.”
“I imagine then that you have never been with a man? Not even as a vampire?”
“No,” I stated simply. Niven’s persistence on this subject was making me a little uncomfortable again.
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