The Colour of Death

by Elizabeth Davies

  ‘So, I could turn into a vampire?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so. Consider how often a vampire might need to take blood – if people were turned into the undead with every bite, we’d be overrun with them. Also, as you’re in this house of God under your own volition, I suspect your immortal soul is safe.’

  ‘For now?’ I heard what he hadn’t said.

  ‘For now,’ he agreed. ‘The baptism I performed on you cleansed you of your sins and gives you a certain amount of protection.’

  ‘It didn’t prevent Rochdale from attacking me,’ I pointed out. ‘Or from Meadow practically tearing my throat out.’

  ‘Not physical protection. Spiritual.’

  ‘It’s physical protection I could do with right now,’ I grumbled.

  ‘You’ve got me,’ Crow said, and I wondered how long he’d been listening.

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened yesterday,’ the priest wanted to know.

  I told him, leaving nothing out, apart from the bit where I’d thought Crow was making love to me.

  Father Andrew tutted when he heard I’d invited Rochdale into my home after being advised not to, but he didn’t say “I told you so”. Instead, he said, ‘At least it confirms the fact that vampires have no option but to leave if the invitation is revoked.’ He shook his head at the part where I’d almost been burnt to death and raised his eyebrows when Crow took the reins and told him about what we’d seen on the camera.

  It was time for me to come clean and let him in on my secret. Father Andrew believed in life after death, angels, demons, and vampires, for God’s sake. I was sure my little affliction wouldn’t send him running screaming from the room.

  I shot a meaningful look at Crow, and when he nodded, I took a deep breath, and blurted, ‘I can see auras.’

  Before I had a chance to say anything else, Father Andrew clapped his hands and cried, ‘How wonderful!’

  I blinked; I don’t think I’d ever met anyone so delighted to hear about my “gift” before. He gestured for me to go on.

  ‘I’ve seen them all my life and everyone has one,’ I explained. ‘I can’t see my own, but I expect I’ve got one, too. However, there is an exception.’ I hesitated, and Father Andrew leaned forward in his chair as I said, ‘Vampires don’t.’

  ‘I see...’ He focused on a spot over my shoulder. ‘Interesting. Of course, if, as some claim, auras are a reflection of the soul, then a vampire’s lack of one would make perfect sense.’

  Crow jerked and I guessed what he was thinking.

  ‘Meadow didn’t have an aura, did she?’ he asked me.

  I caught my bottom lip with my teeth. ‘No.’

  He addressed his next words to the priest. ‘Does that mean she’s not in Heaven?’

  Father Andrew thought for a moment. ‘Who can tell what’s in a person’s heart, except God?’

  Crow’s jaw clenched and his eyes hardened. He clearly didn’t like the answer. ‘She didn’t ask for this,’ he retorted.

  The priest’s expression was impassive; I suspected he knew as little about the afterlife as we did.

  ‘Tell me,’ Father Andrew said, speaking to me this time. ‘What colour is Crow’s aura?’

  The question took me by surprise. What did it matter? At least he had one, unlike his sister. Anyway, from what I’d gathered over the years, although auras reflected people’s personalities to a certain extent, they were also a result of life events, as well as giving hints as to other things like mental or physical illnesses. The phrase “it felt like a black cloud was hanging over me” when someone was depressed, didn’t refer to metaphors about the weather so much as to the murkiness of their auras. Sometimes black was a result of losing someone close, or from abuse, or other tragedy. It didn’t mean the person was dark or evil. Therefore, the colour of Crow’s aura was a mere curiosity, nothing more. Seeing the colour of a person’s aura certainly hadn’t done me much good, so far.

  I answered anyway. ‘Red. Many, many shades of red,’ I said. ‘And some black.’ Too much black, thick and oily.

  I could feel Crow’s stare on my cheek, his gaze grazing my skin, abrasive and rough.

  ‘Red. Hmm. The colour of life,’ Father Andrew said.

  Really? I wasn’t convinced. I associated it more with blood. And recently, death.

  ‘The blood of Christ features very strongly in the Christian religion,’ the priest continued. ‘We drink his blood, symbolically of course through the transubstantiation of wine, and then there are the old sayings, like blood is thicker than water, blood brothers, and so on.’

  Nope. It still didn’t work for me.

  ‘Of course, it’s also associated with anger, love, and lust,’ he went on. He gave Crow a curious glance. ‘I suspect all three are strong in you.’

  From the narrowing of his eyes, Crow didn’t seem impressed with the priest’s verdict.

  ‘And you’re saying vampires don’t possess an aura?’ the Father asked.

  ‘No, they don’t. At least, Rochdale and Meadow didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘Do you know if any others like you have witnessed the same phenomena?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘No idea. I’ve never spoken to anyone about it. I’ve never spoken to another aura reader or psychic, period.’

  Father Andrew studied me with the same intensity as a scientist who’d just discovered a new species of insect. ‘You know what this means?’ he asked.

  I took a guess. ‘I’m cursed?’

  ‘Far from it, my dear. You have a valuable gift. No wonder Rochdale wants you dead.’ He paused to let the information sink in.

  I’d already worked that out for myself.

  ‘He sees you as a threat. Imagine being able to point a vampire out at a hundred paces?’ the priest continued.

  Yeah, imagine.

  ‘That’s why he sent Meadow to your home, Crow. He knew you’d let your guard down when you saw her. I’m guessing that instead of just killing you, Olivia, and being done with it, she couldn’t resist taking your blood. See, we’re back to blood again. Without it, vampires would die.’

  Crow had remained silent thought our exchange, but now he said, ‘Blood isn’t life, Father. It’s death and I’ve seen far too much of it spilt.’

  ‘Yet without it running through your veins, you’d die too,’ the priest pointed out.

  I almost had. Twice. Maybe three times. I was beginning to lose count.

  Without warning, the impossibility of my situation struck me. What was I to do now? I’d lost my home and possibly my livelihood. Without my camera, I was adrift, vulnerable. I’d hidden behind its lens for so long, I didn’t know how to view the world without it.

  What was I supposed to do now, where was I supposed to go?

  My family would put me up (at least, my parents would – I wasn’t so sure about Tim or Melissa) but there was no way I’d expose them to such danger.

  And make no mistake, I was in danger. I felt like the only witness to a murder, but without the benefit of police protection.

  I could just imagine the conversation; “Hello, Officer, please could you put me in the witness protection program, because there’s a vampire after me.” I’d be locked up faster than I could blink. And as for Crow, he’d just plunged a stake through his sister’s heart and had buried her body illegally in a graveyard.

  And let’s not talk about the mad priest who thought nothing of performing religious ceremonies against a person’s will and helping dispose of murder victims. Not that I thought he performed such acts on a regular basis; the bags under Father Andrew’s eyes had grown and his complexion had acquired a grey hue. This night had taken it out of him. It had taken it out of all of us.

  ‘I think we could all do with some sleep,’ the Father suggested. ‘You, my dear,’ he said to me, ‘more than us. There’s no telling how much blood Meadow took from you. You need food and rest as a matter of urgency, and I still think you need medical attention. Crow’s not faring much better, in my opinio
n.’

  ‘No one asked you for it,’ Crow muttered. He got to his feet and was about to walk out of the Father’s office, when he stopped.

  ‘There’s one more thing,’ he said. ‘Just before I— just before she died.’ He swallowed. ‘Meadow said a name.’

  ‘Whose?’ Father Andrew asked.

  ‘Not Rochdale’s. What she said was “Byron”.’

  ‘Who’s he?’ the priest asked.

  I’d heard her say it, too, but hadn’t really thought much of it, having had other things to focus on over the last few hours.

  Please God, don’t tell me there’s another vampire out there, besides Rochdale. I wondered if it was the name of the man who’d visited my house, posing as a police officer? It could be.

  The three of us stared at each other.

  ‘I used to know a man by the name of Byron,’ Father Andrew said. ‘But he’s been dead a good few years.’ His eyes widened as he considered the likelihood. ‘No, it’s not possible. He was an old man, in his eighties at least when he left this mortal coil. It couldn’t be him.’

  ‘It’s not a common name,’ Crow pointed out, the frown line appearing between his brows.

  ‘Wait... there's something.’ I held up my hand. A thought, a memory, skittered just out of reach. I concentrated on hunting it down. Something to do with my childhood...

  School hadn’t been easy for me. I’d kept my head down (or tried to), immersing myself in my studies for want of anything better to do, because my peers tended to avoid me, when they weren’t tormenting me.

  In my late teens, my camera had become my salvation, and literature had been my lifeline.

  I’d read widely and indiscriminately, from poetry to plays and everything in between, not bothering to stick to the prescribed English Literature curriculum, feeling it too narrow, too restrictive. The darker texts had held the greatest appeal for me – the Shakespearian tragedies, and novels like Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s most famous work had been one of the prescribed texts on my course, and my teacher had insisted on the need to read around the novel, to study Shelley’s background, the social and political problems of the day, and the events leading up to the conception of Frankenstein.

  I frowned, letting my thoughts drift. There was something here, if only I could grasp it

  There had been four of them, the night Frankenstein was born: Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Doctor Polidori, and...

  I had it.

  ‘The only Byron I know of,’ I said slowly, ‘is the romantic poet, Lord Byron.’ I reached into the depths of my mind for the distant, almost-forgotten, but all-important fact, the one that had been teasing me ever since Meadow had spoken.

  ‘His full title was George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale.’

  Chapter 54

  Lord Byron – Present Day

  I felt the death of the young one as a visceral anguish reverberating through every part of me. I should have known better. I did know better, but a rare and long-unfelt unease had taken hold of me, clouding my judgement. I should have gone myself to smoke the synaesthete out, and not trusted the deed to one so recently created. If I had, there would have been no need to use Meadow to infiltrate the man’s house.

  Patience – I had cultivated it carefully over the years – had inexplicably deserted me. Something about the aura reader was unsettling. I had not experienced such emotion in centuries, and a part of me, a flighty, giddy part, felt dangerously alive once more.

  Nevertheless, they will all die for what they’ve done.

  The girl. The man who calls himself Crow. The priest.

  Then I will seek out and kill any and all who claim to see auras.

  I could not risk this happening again, I couldn’t risk being “seen”.

  Their God famously said, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”.

  It works both ways.

  A Little Bit of History

  Lord Byron, George Gordon Noel, sixth Baron Byron, to give him his full title, led a privileged yet troubled early life. His mother neglected him emotionally, his nurse paid him far too much attention in entirely the wrong kinds of way in the form of physical and sexual abuse, and he was sent away to boarding school for long periods.

  He had sex with women, yet didn’t appear to like them much and was cold towards them, even as he enjoyed bedding them. He had both a hunger for, and a distaste of, the opposite sex. He fell in love with several boys and men, but was forced by society to deny his sexuality. He’d had an incestuous affair (allegedly) with his sister. He was petulant, troubled, quick to anger, dark, pessimistic, brooding, and could be violent. He was also described as brilliant, intelligent, passionate, and mesmerising.

  He was full of contradictions. He was a dandy who was a good sportsman. He pretended an aversion to educated women, but married Annabella Milbanke, who was highly educated and extremely religious. Their daughter, Ada Lovelace, became a pioneer of computer science. He was unusually shy when it came to meeting new people, but was utterly gregarious and people flocked to him. He was fascinated by religion, but sent a personal application to the Archbishop of Canterbury for a specific license not to marry in church.

  One of his female conquests, Lady Caroline Lamb, described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” His wife called him a “fallen angel”.

  In the summer of 1816, near Lake Geneva, Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John Polidori tasked each other with writing ghost stories. Shelley produced nothing of interest. Mary wrote Frankenstein. Both Byron and Polidori wrote about vampires. Byron’s was a fragment of a novel. Polidori’s The Vampyre was a short story, and it was the publication of this work which launched the public’s fascination with all things vampire. The fact that it was originally published under Byron’s name added to its success.

  Polidori based his character, Clarence de Ruthven, Lord Glenarvon, on Byron, and was also heavily influenced by Lady Caroline Lamb’s work Glenarvon, which she also claimed was based on Byron.

  It seemed like Byron was to be forever connected with vampires. Most people assumed this was because he sucked the life force out of the people around him, and that any allusion to vampires was a metaphor.

  I’ve taken this one step further (okay, several steps), based on all the above facts, and that when he died at the age of thirty-six in Greece, the doctors who attended him didn’t recognise his corpse. There was an autopsy which brought up some startling facts – the body which was examined was alleged to have died of old age, not a fever. Byron had a deformed right leg – the corpse had a deformed left leg. Byron, by the time he died, was thin, almost emaciated even. The body being autopsied was plump.

  Byron’s “corpse” was preserved and returned to England for burial. But his nearest and dearest also didn’t recognise him. In fact, they claimed the body in the coffin didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to Lord Byron; the earlobes were wrong, the deformed foot was wrong.

  So, you can see where I’m going with this, where I went with it in my story – did Byron truly die, or was his death an undeath?

  If you want to read more about him, there are plenty of excellent biographies out there. The Vampyre by John Polidori is available free online, as is Glenarvon by Caroline Lamb.

  By Elizabeth Davies

  Resurrection series

  State of Grace

  Amazing Grace

  Sanctifying Grace

  Fall from Grace

  Eternal Grace

  Caitlyn series

  Three Bloody Pieces

  A Stain on the Soul

  Another Kind of Magic

  The Colours series

  The Colour of Death

  and

  The Spirit Guide

  The Medium Path

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