“Come with me!” he whispers.
And although his voice is hushed, appealing, it's as if my brain really wants, imperatively, to obey him. And I do so, although all my being cries at me not to follow him, that if I do this, I will be in danger with my life. With a massive effort of will, I'm trying to break the contact with his eyes, to regain again my own control.
“Mais non, ma petite, regarde-moi! (No, my little one, keep looking at me!” he says softly. “Viens avec moi! (Come with me!)”
His mellow voice commands me again, and his eyes make me obey him with ease. Not even the cold air from outside doesn't make me wake up from under the spell that I’m
charmed with. I am motionless, totally in his power. His head moved around me, keeping talking.
“What a curious thing you are!”
And his voice seemed full with amazement.
“You smell like a hunter, but you are not one of them. Your blood is pure and sweet.”
He swipes wet his lips with his tongue, lustfully. His irises start to become red. He approaches me, and he sniffs me.
“Yes, it is very sweet. And when it comes to a human, you are very strong. It never happened to me to come twice after a human being, and you almost made me to come for a third time. Not that you wouldn't have been worth it!”
I don't know what he says. But I know, with all my being, that it wasn't something good. Kyrya! Dom! But my lips do not want to be apart. I shout after them only in my mind, but I can make no sound whatsoever. Because I judge less and less. The fascination that this man triggered is above my will. His ice-cold hand touches my neck, and he bends my head to one side. This coldness... of his hand… I've felt it once on my skin, and under my lips.... But if in those times I could reject it, now it is as if I am paralyzed.
“ Ouvre un peu to bouche, s’il te plait! (Open a little your mouth, please!)” he says very softly.
And again, against my will, I part my lips. His mouth settles over my mouth. My lips trembled under his. Again, I feel his temperature of ice. Oh! What are you? I wanted to ask him. How can I call what you are? For that I had met in the past someone like you, but that someone didn’t paralyze me, to touch me, he didn't charm me so that he could kiss me... He used to let free my will, even if I see now that he didn’t have to…
“How much sweetness!” he said with amazement, again. “I shall keep you!” He then suddenly says, as if he had taken a decision. “It will be hard to stop myself to don't empty you of blood, but I will keep you!. You deserve this effort! And then you'll be mine forever!”
I don't know if I cried out. I think I've done it. For that the pain that I felt when his teeth protruded above my jugular was unbearable. I felt the stream of blood swallowed by him. It is only now that I am in control over my senses, members, and reactions, but I also know that it's too late. I am more and more loose. I realize that I'm dying. It is ridiculous that in the last moments of my life, to think about the fact that, once again, the words 'Happy birthday’ were fatidic? My gaze mists with tears. I feel the chill of death… And I see the snowflakes... I wonder where the snow is coming from? The image of a blue gown passes through my eyes... In my feet I wear sneakers… And the snow is falling over me, while a face, framed by golden hair leans over me and kisses me, taking my last breath.... It’s not that bad that, in my last moments, to remember something like this… If only… I don't get to see his face… I fail to remember his name... And then...
Like in a dream, I hear screams. As indeed I see two figures that threw themselves upon us. The man, or whatever he would be, let go of me with a cry. I fell on the asphalt, but I don’t have the power even feel the pain. I hear the sounds of some animals fighting. In my soul, I know that the two figures are Dom and Kyrya. But I don’t have the strength to look at them for one last time, as to thank them for everything. The sounds I heard are more and more terrible, as if a creature would be stripped down and screamed
in agony. It's a pity. It's a pity that my last moments are so dreadful. But what could I expect? Isn't that what my whole life was as well?
And all of a sudden, the figure which I couldn’t remember, Dane’s face, clearly appears in my mind. Every memory about him, which I tried so very hard to arbor, showed to the surface in all its powers. Indeed, it's a pity. It is only now that I realize that in a way, I had hoped that I would see him at least once until I die. I hoped that I will kiss his lips, at least once, until I close my eyes forever. I have hoped that... we should be able to ...
CHAPTER TWO
I wake up from the incredible nightmare I had. I feel myself burning with fever. I try to stand, but I go with dizziness and nausea. Beside me, Kyrya moves so fast, that I startle. My heartbeats accelerate.
“Are you all right?” she asks me.
I have never seen her tired. If I look at her, she doesn't seem to be. But her voice is that of an exhausted woman. My mouth is so very dry.
“So-and-so.” I say. “Why are you asking me that? What happened?”
The bedroom’s door opens and Dom makes his appearance. He looks almost old. Their faces are serious, almost distraught. Their allure scares me...
“What? What happened?” I ask them again.
I see that the curtains are drawn. An instinct warns me that bright light would have bothered me. I gather the weight of my thoughts, trying to remember. I panic. I panic because I realize with horror that many of my memories are dimmed, or even deleted. I start to quiver uncontrollably, and my voice is shaken.
“I… Kyrya… mother... What happens? What happens to me?”
But she swallows, avoiding my eyes.
”Dom?” I ask him then, as a suppliant.
But he looks down, at the tip of his shoes
My panic is becoming increasingly more evident, as I realize that there is still me, but a completely different person. I feel that I burn. I take my trembling hand to my forehead. It is very hot.
“I think I have the fever.” I say.
Dom and Kyrya look at each other. On their faces, I can read their guilt.
“My lips, my mouth, and my throat are very dry.” I say hen.
“Patricia...”
Kyrya interrupted herself. I've never seen her so confused, so without words.
“Tell me the truth!” I demand. “What happens to me? Am I ill?”
“Let’s just wait a few days, see if you pull yourself together.”
Then I see Dom turning his attention toward Kyrya.
“It makes no sense, Kyrya.”
And his voice is gentler than I have ever heard it before.
“Dom, please!” begs Kyrya.
But he shook his head.
“She will find out anyway. It's better for her to know now, to understand what she have to go through.”
Then, he looks at me and he smiles with an obvious paternal pride.
“She is no longer a little girl, eh, Patricia?”
I nod approvingly.
“She is an adult, ready to hear anything, right?”
I make the gesture, again. Although in such circumstances my heart would have had to pump fast, the pace I now feel in my chest makes me put a scared hand on the left side
of my chest. It's as if I were in ventricular fibrillation, as though my heart is going to jump out of my chest. I think that, if I check my pulse, I beat over 400 per minute.
“Please!” I beg them again.
Kyrya look at Dom, which confirms, slowly nodding. Then she pulls air into her chest, and she begins to speak.
“Patricia...”
I think with some irritation that if they are going to tell me that I am going to die, it would be better to tell me at once than take the devious.
“Patricia, you were very seriously ill.” Kyrya starts talking. “So ill, that we did not know if you will survive. Do you still remember the evening at the club?”
My mind vaguely outlines our images, so I half admit it.
“Good, that’s very goo
d. But when you're out of the club... Do you still remember?”
Remembering the blood from my neck flowing into the mouth of an unknown creature fills me with horror, anger, but also a strange instinct to kill, to delving into the creature. I press my heart with my palm even harder. I shudder all over. Then I take my other hand to my throat. Although I'm very confused and I do not understand anything at all, I realize that my movement is too fast. Unnatural.
“Yes.” I confirm again to Kyrya.
“Now you are well, thank goodness for that! But we've dreaded, me and Dom, that you weren’t going to be fine again, right, Dom?”
“What was that thing anyway?” I want to know. “What kind of animal was it?”
“No, Patricia, that was not an animal.” Dom started to speak. “That was a disgusting leech!” he hissed with disgust and anger. “It was a stinking, rotten, parasite, which, as far as I could tell, wanted to turn you into the same thing as him.”
They see my face in distrust.
“I know it is hard to believe,” Kyrya resumes “but we, our kind, are chasing them for thousands of years.”
It's clear. In fact, this is the nightmare. I have not yet woken up from the dream. As if I slept or sleep yet, and I had a dream in a dream from which I have not yet awakened. I rub my eyes. It is undeniable that I am awake.
“It can't be true.” I babble through my dry lips.
“Come on, Patricia,” Dome says in a firm tone, “you're with us for long enough to have realized by now that we are not like normal people. Enough about secrets, lies, and faking, enough about you pretending that you do not see certain things. You've seen it before, but you did not understand. We are hunters. This is it.”
I feel like Kyrya keeps her breath.
“Patricia, even if we are what we are, we love you anyway. And we have never done anything like this to you, if we had a choice.”
I know that my pupils dilate when hearing her. What does she mean?
“Look,” Dom says as firmly as before, “That scum of vampire drank enough of your blood to either kill you, or to turn you into the nothingness that he was.”
So that was what they called that creature! I realize it. The thought of that creature makes me drool, like when you're hungry and you dire to face the most delicious dish. But my mouth is filled with so much water, which starts to flow beside my tight lips, without me being able to control, myself.
“What is happening?” I shout, splashing the air around me with my abundant saliva.
After a few moments of silence, Kyrya talks like she was attending a funeral.
“Sorry, Patricia, I am so sorry, but I had no choice. I could not stand and look how you die, or how you’d turn into something worse than if you had died. So…”
“So?” I urge her to continue, presaging what already was to come.
“So we had to make you one of our own.” she said tongueless.”That is a hunter.”
I do not know too well what this means yet. It doesn’t seem to me something so unacceptable, so obnoxious. I am still scared of all the changes I feel within me, but as I already know, the human can get used with almost anything. If a human has not reached yet, his endurance limit, then he or she can still assimilate, yet is able to understand, still able to accept the change. I realize that's not my limit.. And how could I ever have to condemn these people, Kyrya and Dom, for what they did? And I mean it when I say: people. Not creatures. I know that they have a soul. I know that they care. I know they are suffering. I also know what they actually are, some killers. But they are killers of killers, so that doesn't matter too much. Because they do, in the end, a good thing. And how could I ever reject these so-called killers? Well, I wouldn't be able to. Because these so-called killers are the ones who gave me life for the third time, these so-called killers are those who love me.
I give them my hands. It’s like they can’t come to believe. They both rush toward me with a single jump, and I embrace them both. For now, we are a family of hunters, but happy.
I needed some time to realize that in fact, there was no happiness, that in fact, that was the basis for me losing everything I had human inside me, it was the starting point of my wickedness, for eternity. Now I wonder if it would have been better to finish with my life then. Yes, it would surely have been... But then...
Then I was technically pretty easy to go from my human condition to the Hunter’s one. At first. The days, in which I restored, I stayed in bed, under the careful care of those that now were my parents in every possible way. Yes, in every possible way. Not only because they groomed me as real parents, but because they gave me life, for real, becoming also my creators. So as I said, my start was easy.
But passing time, I realized that the dryness of my throat, and my mouth, the tension in which I increasingly were increasingly unbearable.
I put my trembling finger my cracked lips. I don't know why I feel so weak. This dire hunger feeling I didn’t feel for many years. And as if never with so much intensity. It's as if someone drills my stomach. It's more than feeling hungry. It's a terrible pain that actually prevents me to breathe. The fever I feel in my throat tightens my neck. As though fire would poured into it. It also prevents me from breathing. I take both hands at my throat, and I fall to my knees. I gaped, trying to pull air, avidly. The air I swallow with very great difficulty burns me even worse. Only now I see that my image in the mirror and who stared back at me is foreign. It's a distorted, horrible face, with eyes gouged out in orbit. My irises are ebony in color, with flames colored glitters. Through my open mouth, I see very clearly my frightening teeth. From everything I know, vampires are supposed to have fangs, not me. But, to my horror, the reflection in the mirror uncovers a couple of grotesque large canines, sharp and hideous. No, I can't be this animal picture! I make a sound gorged with more dread than suffering now. My dismay emphasizes still further when, with a horrible sound, the nails of my fingers
instantly increase, they actually becoming deadly weapons, because now my nails are like knives made of the strongest alloy, sharp double edged. I gasp in horror.
Kyrya and Dom immediately appear.
“Holy Lord!”
My ears wheeze. However, I hear very clearly Dom’s voice.
“The hunger!” I hear Kyrya too, who only whispered.
Dom takes me in his arms, and he puts me back in the bed, while Kyrya returns in a record time with a plate of food. The instant I feel the smell, my mouth instantly fills up with water. Or so I think. Although the taste of my own mouth is different than saliva. But whatever it is, the too much quantity pours between my canines. Kyrya couldn’t reach around me fast enough, that I am doing a jump and I stick my mouth in the plate. The divine taste banishes the tension in my body. I make beastly sounds while I devour all there is on the plate. Only at the end, I realize that what I was eating is raw meat. All of a sudden, with a jump, I step back and I hit the wall. I didn't even feel the blow.
“Are you better now?” Dom asks me.
How can I be better? How can he ask me such a thing? I just realized that I had become neither more, nor less than an animal, and he asks me to be okay? I take a quick look in the mirror, and I see that I no longer have my canines so big. The yellow flames from my eyes banished as well, leaving my irises with that ebony color. My claws retreated to their normal size, turning into nails again. I feel a little better and I catch the courage to better study myself. I note that that terrible scar on my neck has completely disappeared. I touch myself in that area, unbelievingly. My eyes are moving with lightning speed to Dom and Kyrya. I have to know. I need to know.
“I want to know everything.”
My demand could be just fine a command, but under these circumstances, no one noticed.
“Very well, then.” Kyrya says. “It's better for you to know in advance, rather than learn them along the way. As you have already achieved, we are the hunters.”
I make a gesture of impatience. I want to know more than t
hat.
“Listen to me, and take your time!’ says Kyrya again. “We have some uncontrollable appetites, lusts, which, if we do not satisfy, we enter into that state you have just passed: we struggled all we can, and then our body gives way and dies. What you have felt in the mouth was not saliva, as you might think, but it was venom.”
“So, are we a variety of vampires?”
Their faces are horrified now.
“Don’t even joke about that!” says Dome, disgusted. “They are like leeches, parasites that kill and destruct the human race. We are not like them. Our appetite - on the contrary - is to be fed with their flesh.”
I feel that I take with dizziness.
“You mean… that what I just ate... It was... Are you saying that... That I ate a...”
“Oh yes, it was vampire's flesh. For humans, vampires are indestructible. For us, they are no longer quite the same. Of course, it is not easy to kill a vampire, but it is not impossible. Our teeth, especially when we are hungry, can pierce their skin very easily. And so our claws, which can penetrate into their bodies, in their organs”.
This information causes me a real physical harm.
“We are called hunters because, first of all we hunt vampires, to exterminate them. We are part of The Great Hunters’ Order. It is a secret Order, as you may realize. We are not created, such as yourself, we are born hunters, and we are pure. The cases in which we are able to let anyone become like us are very rare. Because human blood is impaired by the blood of a Hunter.”
It’s silence again.
“The problem is,” Kyrya continues, “that you have in you three kinds of blood: human blood: vampire and that of a Slayer, of a Hunter. We do not know how will you evolve or what you become.”
The Huntress: Becoming a Huntress Page 2