Fabien

by Lynch, Sarah Michelle

  “Fabien, make yourself comfortable in the living room,” Jodie gestured and headed on to what I presumed was the kitchen. Her back to me as she walked away, the sight of her rear in that tight, black party dress beckoned me to tear her clothes off. However, I was worried—the last time we got carried away, she died—any passion elicited from our kiss earlier was slowly ebbing away as reality came crashing back.

  So, what is a living room? I’d never encountered such a thing before. A parlour, perhaps? As I walked inwards I found it to be just that. By the hideously superficial fireplace, I waited, uncharacteristically anxious.

  When she joined me in the room, she carried a glass of wine and murmured, “I didn’t know what you’d like?”

  “Ah, nothing. Quite right.”

  “Hmm.” She sat herself down and motioned I do the same.

  I situated myself in an armchair and found it off-putting that I couldn’t read her thoughts. In fact more than the wintry weather had frozen our connection since our delicious kiss back at the house party. I needed to know why. Something obviously troubled her too and she seemed changed of heart.

  I just had to ask, “How do you know my name? I didn’t tell it to you.”

  She pulled her legs beneath her body and tipped the glass. I saw heat rising in her cheeks the more she drank—and she drank heartily.

  When she turned her eyes back upon mine, they flashed green as she revealed, “I remember everything.”

  I swallowed I know not what, but it was something odd. “Everything?”

  She nodded slowly. “My former life.”

  “How?” I growled so loudly, she became frightened.

  This could not be! I could not believe it! How could she know anything of her former life, unless…

  “She visits me through my mother.”

  “She?”

  Jodie (for she was Jodie now, not Juniper) looked carefully into my eyes. “You know whom I speak of. That witch. I shall not speak her name, not while she may well be listening. She got to me first. In fact she placed me right here, in this cold, Gothic town… on purpose.”

  I stood and paced the room. The house, a fairly modern property, shook beneath me as I trampled—my strength exerted without effort.

  “Fabien, calm down,” she begged, “I worked hard to get this house. I don’t think insurance covers demolition by vampire.”

  Damn this world. She is not of my world, and I’m not of hers.

  “You’re human, I remember now, and I know… I was foolish to continue looking for you. Foolish,” I repeated, my hands vibrating spherical patterns of energy throughout the atmosphere surrounding me. “I should go.”

  “You shouldn’t. Please, listen. Sit back down.”

  I could have left the room and her alone, flying off so quickly, she would never have seen me leave. She would never have had the time to protest. However, she needed me.

  “Okay,” I agreed, saddened my love for her now felt tainted.

  I bowed my head and listened as she pleaded her case, something she was no doubt expert at.

  “Fabien, my mother doesn’t know her body is regularly invaded. She knows nothing of it, neither does my sister Jaimie. Only I have encountered the monster, which for reference’s sake I will call Liza. She first spoke to me through my mother when I was five and told me I was never meant to reincarnate. No soul does within a thousand years. It’s dangerous, apparently, and not enough time for human history to wipe out the footprint of the original. Too many reincarnations and the world would collapse. However, Liza was beginning to miss you, she told me. Being only small, I didn’t understand her words at the time, of course, but I never forgot them. She told me she had lost sight of you. You were roaming, a wanderer, lost to her. She told me you were the only thing in the world she loved and she foolishly thought she could teach you a lesson in cursing you. Her naïve hope was that you would return to her after tiring of your banishment. She resurrected me because she knew you would be drawn directly to my side.”

  “Merde.”

  “As I grew, I received more visits from her. Eventually, I told my father of this character my mother sometimes became and then two times, he snuck around a corner to witness how she sometimes behaved, only with me. She had been acting strange for a long time and he divorced her when she professed her utmost belief in the occult. In the years that followed their divorce, my mother warned Jaimie and I that love was dangerous and unkind. Her mind was being controlled by Liza, I knew it. When I became a woman, you know, it was then memories of the past began dripping into my mind so that I was gradually able to build a full picture of my past life and how I met my end when I was Juniper. I knew then why Liza was loitering in my world. I knew also that Liza had placed a protective shield around me and all my family so you couldn’t find any of us. You only found me because of Louis, my sister’s husband?”

  “Oui.”

  She smiled sadly. “If your queen hears of this, she will kill not just me, but you too.”

  “Bien sȗr.”

  My love remembers everything?

  I was so shocked, I was speaking French.

  “She is using me only to get to you. You have no idea what my life has been like. I did not want to come back to this world. I really didn’t. I remember not only my past life but the one in-between, too. The in-between is a vault, a cage, where those with unfinished business wait to make it back. She used her craft to bring me back before my time even though I didn’t want to come back. I was already done with this world. I was damned the moment we met and I would have suffered the in-between an eternity rather than return only to be brought back into the arms of a vampire who will never be able to truly love me.”

  I heard passion buried beneath her cold tone but I couldn’t lunge at her with open arms of comfort. It would inevitably lead to much more solicitous discourse—then perhaps, sex.

  “Never truly love you? How can you—” I stopped myself. I couldn’t love her. She would die, all over again. She was succinct, as always.

  We exchanged sullen glances, the truth of all this horseshit clear to us.

  She looked haggard and wasted. With her eyes, she asked for more of the liquor that seemed to soothe her. Within seconds, I reached into the kitchen for the wine bottle and began pouring her another.

  “Thank you,” she said smiling, “so quick, still, Fabien?”

  “Quicker, and, more powerful, dear girl,” I told her, though I doubted my virile strength was enough to keep either of us truly safe.

  I placed myself inside an armchair and she explained, “What I meant when I said you could never love me, was through matrimonial benefits like children. Growing old with me. Being by my side day and night, not just in the dark hours. Being warm with me. Being alive. Being mine.”

  Her words robbed me of my resolve. She’d loved me all those years ago despite our predicament, because she couldn’t un-love me. I felt the same and more.

  “So I said to myself, I said, if you ever came back to me… or if I ever got back to you… there would be only one way we could make amends of this mess. Only one way,” she repeated, her eyes focused on the floor, her decision firm, it seemed.

  I didn’t need to be able to read her mind. Her meaning was in her eyes. “No, Jodie. No.”

  “Yes,” she said firmly, “you have to change me. This time, you must. We’re vulnerable unless you change me.”

  “If I bite you, I will die,” I reminded her, “did she not tell you of the curse?”

  Jodie nodded. “She told me of the curse. Did she not say it would be lifted once you were reunited with me?”

  “Not specifically. I don’t know!” I will not bite you!

  My love raised her eyebrows and muttered, “Bite me. She wants you to. It’s all she wants.”

  “I will never bite you!” I roared, and the ceiling lamp rocked back and forth, a crack appearing in the plaster. “I know what it means to be this and I never want this for you! Go… find yourself
happiness! It is not with me!”

  I soared from the room in the form of my winged self and left her alone, her tears echoing behind me as I raced through the night sky to fly off my despair.

  No, Juniper. No. You must live.

  I vowed with myself never to return to her home again. She was better off without me.

  AFTER flying all night, my agony irrepressible, I threw myself into my tomb inside a crypt hidden beneath York Minster. It was the only place I felt safe in the entire city, the only bed I could sleep in feeling certain I wouldn’t be slain as I dreamt.

  Now I knew why these past 27 years, I had been rooted here in this rotten city. This detestable English city, even. Never in my former life as Fabron, blacksmith’s son, would I have ever imagined myself one day living in this country—an enemy so long kept.

  I’d only remained in York for so long because I somehow knew, she was here too.

  My love.

  In my cold, barren bed as I tried to find sleep during daylight hours, memories of our one, sacred night scattered my shut vision. Always, I dreamt of her. Never did I find sexual gratification, however, not even as my cock grew high.

  I had become so physically strong since leaving Valdoria and all because I never gave into my urges; instead they swam in my veins, renewing and multiplying. Celibacy had me at its mercy and I was living by never-ending virtue of strength leashed, strength maintained. Lovemaking was the one way to weaken me besides blood starvation. Even my towering physical strength combined with my love for Juniper was pathetic in comparison to Leticia’s far-reaching, all-encompassing prowess in witchcraft. She was a force never to be broken. She had too many strings to her highly mechanised bow.

  If ever I made love to a woman again, it would have to be with a she-vampire, otherwise my pent-up libido would break any human choice of lover. I was, in the words of the modern people, gagging for it.

  So as I lay on my marble bed with the lid shut, concealed from the world from every angle possible, I hated the fact my appendage gazed directly at the stars glowing several layers of concrete, earth and stone above.

  That one night I spent in Juniper’s arms haunted me. It repeated its perfect filmic reel to me, and me alone, or so I had always thought. I wondered now if she thought about that night still, too—if it was true that Leticia really had given Jodie all Juniper’s memories.

  I often remembered the very night as if it were happening all over again. The wildflower scent of her hair had never left my nostrils, nor the musky taste between her thighs; never had I forgotten the puffiness of her nipples as I sucked them, the soft scent of soap on her silky limbs, the racing of her heart. Her green eyes hadn’t shown fear even as she’d witnessed me orgasm and become my true self, my vampire self. I think it was her dignity and her bravery which got to me most, her fearlessness and the tender-hearted way she held me after sex as if I was as vulnerable as she, and not a monster beneath. She’d either ignored the fact I was a monster or she’d forgiven it because that’s just who she was.

  The ache of remembrance was always so bittersweet yet I continued to suffer this penance, this atonement, for the loss of her life so long ago. After Leticia murdered my Juniper, I accepted grief as a privilege and embraced it. It meant I had propensity to love, to feel—emotions: vampires were immune, so they said. Grief turned out to be all I had left.

  Having found her again, grief had been replaced by hope, a much more dangerous and wasteful emotion. Though Juniper lived in this reincarnation, Jodie, and it made me happy to know she had been given her second chance, I knew we could never live and be together. Not as long as Leticia lived, too. I knew it.

  ◊◊◊

  FOR the next few days, I flew for miles each night and fed handsomely from several human men, never overfeeding on any one individual yet undoubtedly taking more of my fill from the male population than was necessary. I felt compelled to prepare myself in case Leticia should land in the vicinity. Her arrival wouldn’t seem odd, not given recent events. If she begged for my company, I would give her it, but only because a meeting presented a chance to kill her—and strong was what I needed to be to stand any chance of succeeding.

  Yet days passed and nothing new transpired. If Leticia’s hope had always been to find me, surely Jodie might have given the game—me—away somehow? Unless I was too clever, my hiding places too good, my flight too fast. Yet I knew, Leticia was better than me. Cleverer. More powerful in many ways.

  I was suspicious and paranoid so I flew to Jodie’s house one night and waited on the tile rooftop. She came home late, around 8.30p.m. I guessed she had come from work; her formal attire seemed to signify this as I spied on her from above.

  After she walked in through her own front door, she made a telephone call to her mother. Using my powerful hearing, I overheard it transpire like this:

  The older woman cackled in response to something I had missed, “Yeah, she told me that too… she wants to get pregnant!”

  “Foolish child,” Jodie said, her voice a little different to how I remembered it.

  “Oh I know, I know,” the aged one agreed.

  “Men are so fickle. Mind you, so is she. All this time and she never noticed our collusion.”

  “Oh I know. I know, my mistress. The plan worked just how you said it would, just so.”

  What a vile sycophant!

  It seemed the twins’ mother had been taken in by Leticia, who was actually using Jodie’s body!

  “My lover will come crawling back soon and revenge will be mine, thanks to you.”

  “It has been my honour to serve you, my queen. I know I will be rewarded,” Jodie and Jaimie’s mother said.

  “In the next life you certainly will. I am eager to leave this weak human body. I’ll call with any news.”

  “Yes, goodbye Leticia,” the mother said.

  I was no longer sure Jodie was natural-born. It seemed unlikely!

  To prevent myself acting rashly, I darted into the air immediately and flew away. She couldn’t know I had overheard her conversation, nor that I was angry. If I remained any longer on the roof, I would surely create a disturbance that would be heard. It would give my upper hand away.

  So as I cut manic paths through the night sky, I cursed under my breath. The in-between she spoke of was undoubtedly where my Juniper still languished.

  Where is my love?

  Only hours before I’d felt so sure Juniper was back in the world. Now I knew that was not the case, it was devastating. Somehow Leticia had concocted this plan and she was a fool to think I would fall foul of it.

  If Leticia was occupying a human body in her bid to exact revenge on me, where was her own body? I considered she perhaps laid in state back in Valdoria, her body guarded by her loyal servants as she slept peacefully. Vampires sometimes did sleep for a decade or two, to rejuvenate. Sometimes, because they were bored of the times. In her case, she seemed bored of life without me.

  So, she wanted me back?

  I just wanted this feud, or whatever it was, to cease. I wanted half a chance to kill her before she killed me. One or both of us had to die. It was either or. Relentless uncertainty had driven me almost to unveil myself so many times throughout the long centuries, as I awaited Juniper’s return. Only the thought of her kept me going. I always knew a slip-up would give me away and send rumour back to Valdoria I was alive. I’d always known confrontation would end in catastrophe. Now, I couldn’t protect myself.

  It had been over 321 years since we last saw one another and it had taken just seconds to break my willpower.

  I needed to thrash this out with Leticia, or her guards.

  I needed her dead.

  Or me.

  Because death seemed more attractive than existing a second longer in a world I didn’t belong in.

  Having fed so well recently, I began flying to Valdoria, even knowing the journey would be long. It felt unavoidable after what I’d learned. My passion for this to be over, once and for all, n
ow outweighed everything else.

  JODIE

  Three Months Later

  THE LAST TIME she possessed me was three months ago. I returned home from work late and blacked out in the hallway. When I was given my body back around half an hour later, I felt hung-over and dirty. I felt invaded. I rushed into the downstairs toilet and threw up, remaining on the lino for several hours afterwards as I chucked up every last morsel I had to give. It was always a horrendous experience, waking knowing someone as vile and hateful as she had slid into my veins as my mind was overtaken.

  I wondered why she hadn’t returned since. I wasn’t sure.

  When Fabien found me on New Year’s Eve, I was myself until we walked inside my house—and she took over my body then too. I had no idea what she did with him that night, only that when I came round on New Year’s Day, he was gone and I knew we’d never made it to bed together. A woman knows when she has been sexually active and Leticia had been using my body for years…

  In my past life as Juniper I died at her hands and got sent to the spirit world of the in-between, where I remained for almost 300 years before she visited me and said the only way I would ever get back to Fabien was if she made a deal with the sisterhood she belonged to. I never knew what she promised the sisterhood but it had to have something to do with her magical powers.

  Her promise was to give me life once more on the condition that she be allowed to use my body whenever she wanted to. The sisterhood would grant me life alongside my twin—Jaimie—who’d died in childbirth the first time round and was awaiting her chance at life. I wasn’t meant to reincarnate, not for a few centuries more yet. Fabien was being punished, but for what reason, I wasn’t sure—just that my absence was his sentence. As Juniper, I willingly gave myself to Fabien, even knowing it would earn me death. I’d known he belonged to someone of his own kind and even though I’d known he didn’t love her, I still knew being with him was dangerous. But it had been my choice. I’d never expected rebirth to be possible but the chance to see him again was one I hadn’t been able to turn down, no matter the rules imposed upon me as a consequence. So I said yes to Leticia’s plan.