San Francisco Covens: Crucible

by Manuel Tiger

  There was no hesitation at all from him.

  “Vampire.”

  One word. Said so causally. Yet it seem to undo him in that instant as sorrow seemed to flicker like the firelight across his face.

  “V-Vampire?” I repeated staring at him with wide eyes.

  “The Living Dead. Nosferatu. Dracula. Feasters of Blood. Whatever word you wish to use? It all describes what I am! What I have been for the last one hundred and seventy-seven years!”

  My mind was reeling. I tried to grasp onto some logic, some thought that would help me.

  I cycled through what I knew about vampires, which was all garnered from movies and TV shows. I locked onto one thing I could remember.

  “But…but you walk in the sunlight!”

  He held up his hand with the tattoo around the ring finger.

  “This allows me to do such, to even consume human food and drink, to go undetected. A witch helped.”

  “Witch? Vampires and witches are real?”

  “Heaven Falls is home base to them, Henry. Has been for some time, even before my family moved here,” he said stepping toward me as I digested all this. “Along with werewolves. The father and his son in the parking lot. The man that attacked your co-worker tonight. Werewolves. I don’t know why they gather here, but I learned there are other towns across America similar to Heaven Falls where such dwell as well.”

  I just continued staring at him, trying to understand on some level that what he was telling was true. But I couldn’t wrap my head around it, at least not yet. I could only go with the thoughts that were firing off in my head that maybe he was having a mental breakdown and this was how it was presenting itself. That he had had a snap with reality and I was seeing it unfold before me here in this crypt.

  Maybe this snap with reality was making him think he was a vampire! Yes, that had to be it! Maybe if I could get him to see that he wasn’t a vampire he would come around and we could just put this all behind us, forget that it ever occurred!

  What was another sign of one being vampires? Something that he couldn’t possibly do.

  “F-Fangs,” I whispered. “Vampires have fangs,” I said nodding my head. “Do…do you?”

  “You’ve felt them when we have fucked,” he said emphasizing the last word. He was suddenly standing right before me then he took another step so that when I stepped back I was directly pressing back against the wall again.

  That was not the answer I was expecting, not at all!

  Yet I recalled each time we had sex that when he would kiss the side of my neck there would be that piercing pain. It would be brief, but I felt it each time. We had had sex that morning and he had kissed the side of my neck and I felt that pain.

  My hand drifted up to the side of my neck half expecting to find some wound, some tell-a-tale sign of one, yet I knew there would be none there.

  “I add my blood to the bite, to insure it heals, that no scarring occurs,” he whispered.

  “S-Show me,” I said dropping my hand from my neck. “Show me your fangs.”

  He held my gaze and then parted his lips slowly to reveal his fangs that slipped into place over his canines right before my eyes. They were now longer and glittered like blades in the firelight.

  This couldn’t be real, they were some trick teeth, false, something he made. To prove this theory I reached up, touching one, running my finger down the length of it and tugged lightly on the end of it. It didn’t slip off nor so much as budge but I jerked my hand back when I felt a sharp sting occur. I looked at my finger to see a small puncture wound on the tip of it.

  He took my hand and brought it up to his mouth, closed his lips around the tip of my finger and began to suck on it. At once I felt heady and aroused at the same time, a heat spreading from my finger and coursing throughout my body as I gasped and clutched at his chest with my other hand.

  “D-Daman!” I gasped. He held my gaze before he pulled my finger from between his lips, passing his tongue over his bottom lip where a dot of my blood resided. “W-What just happened?”

  “Vampire pheromones,” he replied. “Occurs before or during the bite.”

  “Is…is that why our sex is always so amazing?”

  “It is?” he asked, a ghost of a smile appearing on his lips.

  “Don’t you think it is?”

  “I pull back the pheromones and that is all me that you have,” he said clutching my hand in his, refusing to allow any further space between us as he stepped closer, chest to chest. “I have never once used them to seduce you, to bring you under my control as lore states. I experience the same pleasure as you do, am there with you partaking in it with you at the same time in all its pure form.”

  I could only nod my head unable to say anything else for a moment, gathering my thoughts, piecing them together.

  “Please,” he said bringing my hand up to his lips, kissing my fingers. “Say something, Henry.”

  “I…I don’t know what to say,” I said looking into his eyes. “All this that you’ve just dropped on me is hard to digest in one setting. You’re telling me that something I thought was only confined to the pages of books or what I thought to be made up by TV? By movies? Is all real, that it exists?”

  “I am,” he replied.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I repeated. “I honestly don’t, Daman. My rational mind is rebelling against this, against believing in all this.”

  “And the other part of your mind?”

  “A sea of scattered thoughts, of trying to latch onto the one that makes the most sense to help me fully understand,” I confessed. “I want to believe in the thought that you’re having a mental snap with reality, that you believe yourself to be a vampire. Only that thought is quickly shattered by the evidence now provided,” I said looking to my finger. “Evidence that is as real as you and I standing here in this crypt.” I looked back to him, into his clear blue eyes that held worry and perhaps that of fear now. “And the evidence that is you which tells me that vampires and that of the supernatural itself is as real as the air that we are breathing between us.”

  “Please don’t leave me, Henry!” he said suddenly, passionately, so heartbreakingly painful was his tone it caused my heart to lurch, to skip beats in my chest. “Don’t hate me for what I am! I have hated myself for years now for what I did after my turning!”

  My eyes drifted to the vaults behind him, to the set in stone fact that all bore the same year of death.

  “How...how did they all die in the same year? Was it a fever? A sickness?”

  “If only it was such then I could come here more often and not let my guilt keep me away,” he said turning and gazing at the vaults. “I was mortally wounded during the Battle of Chancellorsville. I was near death when the vampire came upon me and offered me a choice – food for the worms and maggots or immorality. I did not want to die, so of course I accepted immortality. I thought it was some fevered death dream to be honest not believing it was real in any shape or form until the bite was given and the delivery of blood between my lips.

  “Within minutes the transformation was complete but The Craving, the need to feed on fresh blood, had not kicked in yet. I found a horse and rode all night to reach home and when I did? My family was there to greet me, to welcome me having feared the worse when they heard of what had occurred at Chancellorsville.” He laughed cold and bitter which echoed within the crypt. “They should have feared my arrival at their doorstep.”

  “What happened?” I asked in a tone so low I did not think he heard me.

  “I was alone with my father in what is now my office. It was his office then. He was just overjoyed to see me back from the war yet The Craving was rising the more he talked, the more I sat there listening to him, trying to focus on his words. Finally, The Craving took hold so greatly and I attacked him, fell upon him and tore out his throat. My mother walked in upon me feasting on him,” he said and I watched a tear make its way down his cheek. “She screamed but the demon, th
e spirit, whatever it is that harbors within vampires, merely saw her as prey and not my mother. Even with her blood still hot in my mouth I was still ravenously hungry and by then a commotion had begun in the house bringing my brothers who fell to me as well and then that of my brother’s wife and children. My other brother’s wife was hiding in the attic with my sister and I taunted and teased them mostly cruelly before my sister made her escape.

  “There should be some small favor that she did not die at my hands but at her own. She fell from the roof and to the ground below instantly breaking her neck. My sister-in-law however was not so lucky and I added her to the pile of what was left of my family.

  “Servants fled into the night never to return and I became the sole surviving member of my family.”

  I swallowed but only stepped closer, wrapping my arms around him as I shed my tears for him as well, for what he had lost at his own hands. Someone with better common sense perhaps would have ran screaming from the crypt and into the night. But how could I do that to the man that I loved? As he, and others had said to me before, and now I of him, it was not his fault what had happened. It was the nature of the beast within that led him to commit the grisly deaths of his family.

  “I felt remorse, anger and tried several times to kill myself,” he whispered latching onto me, allowing me to rest his head on my shoulder as he had done for me. “But each time I stepped into the sun and felt the burning begin? I retreated back into the safety of the shadows.

  “I stayed indoors, looked after the place by night, but tongues then as they do now began to wag in Heaven Falls of the sudden seclusion of the Salvadori family from society when I ventured there to hunt. Finally, I visited the town one evening and announced a fever had taken my family, that they were already buried in the family crypt my father had only recently constructed. To prevent the sickness form spreading was the excuse I gave for so quick burials. No one questioned though they did wonder why I did not visit the town but only in twilight hours.

  “In time I began to research, to look more into this vampirism, to learn more about it and in hopes to tame The Craving that, as it does with newly made vampires, was great and all consuming. In my research and eventual travels from River Haven I came across a powerful witch in New Orleans who said that she could help me.

  “So I took the offer and she placed the tattoo on my finger. I do not know if I truly believed it would allow me to walk again in the sunlight, to taste of food and drink again or even feel human for that matter, but I hoped that it would.

  “So when dawn arrived of the next day I walked out into the sunlight to greet either my demise or to feel again the warmth of the sun on my flesh.”

  “And obviously it did help,” I said running my fingers through his hair.

  “Aye, that it did,” he said laughing but it held no warmth, only that of a bitter coldness. “And since then I have lived at River Haven on and off through the years. I have found others like me, kept company with them, was lover of some, but never found what I most desired and wanted in any of them.”

  “Which is?”

  He brought his head back and held my eyes with his, trapping me in the depths of those blue depths that suddenly burned with warmth, the coldness of moments ago no longer residing within them. “I have found with you all that I have craved and hungered for Henry. A lover that is mine alone, that I do not have to share or be forced to share among others. Nor do I ever desire to share you for greedy I am with you and would lay low any that dared to suggest such.

  “You see? I foolishly allowed myself to follow a script I had no desire to take part in, to be an actor on a stage I did not want to be on. I allowed myself to think that love could be used as a weapon, a dagger to be driven into the heart and twisted so the other could get their way. I allowed myself to be led along paths that I now regret for what I thought of as love was merely an illusion.

  “And illusion it was. There never was any semblance of love! It was a lie, a trick! I did not know what love really was until I saw you, met you and now I have found with you what I have always wanted, have always desired to have,” he said in a voice so full of heat and desire I found myself holding onto him tighter. “My mother once told me that when you can barely go but a second without thinking of the one who holds you heart, when you find yourself thinking of them and they bring a smile to your face instantly? When each time they enter the room and you find yourself at a loss for words and all thoughts flee except that of the knowledge that you love this person dearly and fiercely?” he cupped my face in his hands and kissed me softly. “Then you know you have found the one that you are meant to be with for all time and you Henry Sullivan are that one for me.”

  I swallowed and smiled, my hand coming to cup his cheek. “Daman,” I began but he placed a finger to my lips.

  “Can you be with this beast? This creature that you now know me as? I will accept, force myself to accept, if you cannot be with me now knowing the truth of what I am, of what I have done.”

  “It would be hypocritical of me to turn you away when I have shared the darkest part of my life with you Daman,” I said. “I love you, vampire or not, and while my mind still reels from this truth you have given me, have laid at my feet? Some part of my mind has in some way believed there was always more to this world than what I saw around me.

  “As the little boy that dreamed of princes and kings to save me, and fairytales so too did I believe in the creatures that dwelt in the closet, under the bed and in myths and legends,” I said resting my forehead to his. “I used to pray that one of them would come and save me when…when what was being done to me was occurring. I would pray so hard that the monster under the bed would appear and snatch him, grab him and carry him away to whatever world resided under the bed that was invisible to us.”

  “I will protect you, will slay whoever or whatever tries to harm you, Henry. I am you avowed protector, your king, your prince now.”

  “Be simply still Daman Salvadori, the man whom I love,” I whispered.

  “He is still here,” he said taking me into his arms. “He has never left and never will leave you.”

  He kissed me with a heat I never felt before, with a passion so intense it stole my breath away.

  When we ended the kiss I could do nothing but look into his eyes as another question came to me.

  “Why did you invite Anna here to meet us?”

  “Hope I’m not interrupting something romantic?”

  We both looked toward the stairs to see Anna descending them, a half grin on her lips. “And I believe I am here to give you protection Henry.” She came into the crypt and sat down on one of the stone benches that resided in the middle of the room.

  “Protection?” I looked at Daman.

  “It is why I chose to reveal my truth to you, Henry,” He said keeping his arm around me, keeping me close to the warmth of his body.

  “Should I tell him about Graceland or do you wish to do the honors?” she asked crossing her legs as she rested her hands on a knee. She was dressed in a light gray shirt, jean skirt and leggings, finishing out the outfit with battered old combat boots.

  “Graceland?” I said perplexed. “Elvis’ home in Memphis?”

  “Bryan Graceland,” Daman replied though he looked at me with an amused expression. “My ex who I told you about who said they were leaving for a week? Only it turned into twenty years.”

  “Thank god. I don’t know how you put up with him for as long as you did,” Anna said as I looked at her. Twenty years? She knew Daman and his ex some twenty years ago? But she looked no older than twenty herself! “I would have been strangling a bitch or running off myself.”

  “Sometimes we must experience the worse to appreciate the best when it comes along,” Daman replied still looking at me.

  “What you just mentioned earlier, the thing about love being used as a weapon? That was about him wasn’t it?” I asked.

  “It was. He always wished to see the depth of my
love for him, to test it,” Daman replied. “If he got pissed at me, which it didn’t take very little for him to get pissed over something, he would sleep with one of his minions or an ex he kept around in Heaven Falls. It became a pattern with him that I eventually numbed myself to.”

  “He acted like some desperate, dramatic housewife,” Anna snorted. “Anyone that had any shit on him he would claim was either lying, crazy or just jealous. And would have these big dramatic blow outs flinging snot and crocodile tears all over when he was caught in his own lies.” She looked at Daman. “I saw his game. I don’t know why it took you so long to see it yourself.”

  “I just got tired of the fights, the confrontations. It was easier to just accept the lies that he told instead of fighting with him all the damn time.”

  “One sick cycle carousel it was,” Anna said with an arched brow.

  “He doesn’t sound very threatening,” I said. “Nothing that a Xanax or Lithium couldn’t cure.”

  Anna grinned. “He enjoyed his dramatic, messy ass behavior too much,” she said. “He always thought he was the best thing to arrive to Heaven Falls since electricity.”

  “He’s very dangerous though, Henry,” Daman said squeezing my hand gently. “He held sway over a large group of loyal followers, some which have remained in Heaven Falls on the fringe. With him gone however they retreated into the shadows only that may not be the case for long.”

  “That guy that attacked Helen tonight in the alleyway?” I asked. “I thought I saw his eyes glow just like the father who was beating his son in the parking lot that night.”

  “Werewolf as I said,” Daman replied. “Bryan had formed connections with a pack in the area that mostly live further up in the mountains in the hollows. I’m pretty sure the one that attacked you and Helen was one of his secret affairs.”

  “Shit,” Anna said.

  “He knew Henry to be mine,” Daman said. “He called him my mate.”

  “The deaths of the campers in the forest can’t be a coincidence then,” she said. “It felt to me more like an announcement.”