Dreams for the Dead

by Heather Crews

  Her chest tightened and she thought she might cry for a million different reasons. I’m a vampire. Oh, god, I’m a vampire.

  The words caught as she uttered them. “I … I’m dead, Tristan. I’m like you now.”

  “I know,” he whispered.

  She was a vampire, cold and dead. This was death. This was the afterlife, just as Tristan had said. Her body was a pillar of ice.

  “Why,” she said in a low, dangerous voice, “didn’t you just kill me?”

  He watched without a word as she rose to her feet and began moving slowly toward him. Her muscles were tensed, her jaw tight. Her hands, clenched into fists against her thighs, trembled. She spoke with seething calm.

  “The night we met, you said the rules dictated that you kill me. Well, why didn’t you, Tristan? Why didn’t you just fucking kill me then? Why didn’t you spare me all the shit I had to put up with just for trying to get my best friend away from you sick fucks? Why, Tristan? Why didn’t you kill me!”

  Her voice broke into a manic shriek and her body exploded with violent rage. She threw herself on top of him, slapping his face, pounding her fists on his face and shoulders and wherever else she could reach. She screamed and cursed, hating him, hating him. Hot tears blinded her and she kept flailing even after he’d grabbed her wrists to stop her from hitting him. He came to his knees and got behind her, wrapping his arms tightly around her torso until she’d lost the energy to fight. She sat there in his embrace and he held her without a word. She wept herself silent.

  “I wasn’t going to come,” he said in a low, soft voice, not quite a whisper. He rested one cheek atop her head. “I was going to forget about you. But Jared turned up with Leila, and he said he’d left you with Branek. And I came. I had to. I was … scared. But he was already gone, and you were here on the floor where he’d left you, and I could smell death. You were changing.”

  “He gave me his blood,” she said. “He forced me to drink it. Before he …”

  Forgive me, he’d whispered. That wasn’t going to happen.

  “Did it hurt?” Tristan asked.

  “Yes. It hurt. Everything about it hurt. And then it didn’t, probably because dead people don’t feel pain. But I guess it doesn’t matter now,” she added with a tremulous sigh.

  “You’re very brave.”

  She let out a disbelieving laugh. “Is that what you think about me?”

  “I think a lot of things about you. Right now, I think you need blood.”

  Dawn flinched. “How am I supposed to get that?”

  “I usually go and find someone on the street. But you could always go to someone you know.”

  Zach’s face flashed in Dawn’s mind but she dismissed the notion. Drinking from Leila was similarly out of the question. “I don’t think I’d like to do that to someone I know.”

  “Unsuspecting strangers it is, then.”

  “Tristan …” She turned in his arms to face him. “How do I … I mean, I’m not sure I can just attack someone on the street.”

  “I’ll help you,” he said. “It’s not so bad, once you get used to it.”

  She would venture to guess taking blood from strangers wasn’t so great either, but she would have to get used to it, like he’d said. It was simply her life now.

  Dawn glanced back at the door as they left the apartment. “Will I need to be invited back in?” She remembered having to do that for Tristan, though she hadn’t known he was a vampire at the time. Branek had forced her to invite him, too.

  “No,” Tristan said. “You already lived here and you were made inside these walls.”

  They walked. Tristan was impassively beautiful. Dawn realized her vision hadn’t magically improved and that she still had to wear her glasses to see anything. Apparently being a vampire didn’t change the shape of your corneas.

  Not much time had passed since Branek’s attack. It was still night, hours before sunrise. The dark would aid their ability to obtain blood in a stealthy manner, she thought. Her street, lined mostly with other apartment complexes, was deserted, but so many windows faced out. Though it was late, Dawn worried someone might see them.

  They crossed the street to Palm Bay. Murder Bay, Dawn and Leila had called it, after a man had killed his girlfriend on a night ending in a wash of red and blue police lights. The complex had since gone bankrupt and had been vacant for months.

  Tristan led her behind it. The space between a corner building and a long cinder block wall was a narrow alley of unkempt grass and bits of trash the wind had deposited there.

  “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Dawn watched as he made his way out of the alley and through a nearby opening in the wall. On the other side was a rocky desert lot littered with the occasional overturned shopping cart. It sloped unevenly down to the back of a convenience store advertising beer, cigs, and snacks. Tristan was a sinuous shadow.

  And now I’m a shadow, too.

  He reached the store and she lost sight of him for a few moments. Suddenly he reappeared with a second figure trudging alongside him. That had been fast. She shrank back behind the wall, pressing herself against it. A headache throbbed behind her eyes. It was suddenly hard to breathe.

  Tristan arrived with his prey—their prey. Dawn opened her eyes to see a skinny young man with a petulant mouth whose eyes furtively scanned the area. “Well?” he demanded abruptly.

  “Are you ready, Dawn?” Tristan said.

  “No.” Nervous, she shook her head. “Can you …?”

  “This better not be some bullshit,” the guy said, growing quickly agitated.

  Unnoticed, Tristan slid up behind him, mouth open to bite. His hands clawed over the young man’s shoulders, holding him in place as his teeth sank in. Dawn’s eyes went wide as she watched the young man thrash briefly. Then his glassy eyes dropped shut and he stilled, and Tristan continued to drink. He looked so dark and alien, so in control, and Dawn felt oddly titillated. The feeling grew into exhilaration as the young man slumped. Tristan held on to him all the way to the ground. She realized she was moving toward them on her hands and knees.

  “He’ll probably die if he loses any more blood,” Tristan said. “Do you want someone else?”

  Dawn didn’t want the young man to die, but she couldn’t imagine two unconscious bodies before her. She couldn’t imagine bringing a person down on her own. She couldn’t imagine waiting any longer. She already recognized the craving, a sort of empty heat not in her stomach, not exactly, but in her veins and muscles. She felt slightly ill, as if she’d had too much strong coffee and not enough food.

  She shook her head silently, frowning, and stared at the guy’s flung wrist. If she could still feel her pulse, it would have been hammering. Her mouth was open, tongue teasing at the points of her fangs. Her body was weak and hot, her craving so strong it robbed her of the ability to think straight.

  “I need it,” she said, distressed. Her eyes burned with unshed tears. “I need it.”

  Tristan didn’t speak as she grabbed the young man’s wrist and pulled it slowly toward her face. After a brief hesitation, she bit down and her mouth instantly flooded with warmth. The blood tasted faintly chemical, unpleasantly so, but it was utterly satisfying, like water for a parched throat. It came so freely, with so little effort on her part, and she swallowed it with greedy passion. This was her sustenance and she would gladly kill for it. She felt powerful and ecstatic with a sudden understanding of bloodlust—a reverence for it. This must have been the sensation vampires sought so ruthlessly.

  At last the blood slowed and she found she’d had enough. Dawn licked her lips as she sat back on her heels. Guilt set in. The young man looked like a boy, pale and still but for the slight rise and fall of his chest. These were his last breaths. Tristan, crouched on the other side of the body, watched her attentively.

  “How did you get him to come up here?” she asked, unable to look away from the body, even though it suddenly repelled her.<
br />
  “You only have to promise them whatever they’re looking for,” he said. “It’s easy when they’re desperate.”

  She poked her fangs lightly into her lower lip, brow furrowed. “It’s so sinister.”

  “Yes. But I do it every night. You will too.”

  “I didn’t know that seeing you drink someone’s blood would be so … well, it was … um.” She cut her eyes to him, not sure why she had trouble uttering a simple word. It was ridiculous she would still feel embarrassed to speak to him of certain things. She wondered if vampires could blush.

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “But I don’t like to mix blood and sex. They’re better separate.”

  “I can hardly believe this. It’s … it’s not something …”

  Dawn didn’t know what she wanted to say. She wasn’t exactly shocked at what she’d become and she could tell Tristan wasn’t either. There would be no discussion on why it should or shouldn’t have happened this way or another. They both accepted that she was a vampire because it was done, and because it was irrevocable. She felt … not sad, but sort of introspective, sort of serene.

  “This is our nature,” Tristan reminded her.

  Sooner or later the act of drinking blood would become normal for her, she supposed, but now it was new and disturbing. She was a predator, but it seemed doubtful she could ever truly think of herself that way. She would drink the blood of strangers. She would do it to survive. This was her life. Oh, god, how was this her life?

  She looked up, away from the body, and stared at Tristan with glistening eyes. “Will you be with me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said firmly. “Okay. I’ll be fine. I will be.”

  It was what she really believed.

  When they got back to the apartment, she attempted to wash away the feel of Branek’s touch, but the memory remained on her skin. Her dark, frightening bruises were gone, healed. Her damage was invisible.

  After the shower, Dawn studied herself in the mirror and found she looked mostly the same. Her delicate mouth was solemn as ever, her wide eyes as indirect, her forehead as high, her resting expression the same one that always made people want to know why she was mad. She didn’t yet have the courage to look at her fangs. Leaning forward until her nose touched the glass, she stared into the dark orbs of her pupils until the depths of them chilled her.

  “What’s all this?” Tristan asked when she returned to her room. He sat on the floor, leaning back against the dust-specked dresser, and nudged the boxes with one shoe.

  “My old life.” She could hardly remember what was in them now. “After we … after I came back, none of it seemed to matter.”

  Tristan wrapped an arm lightly about her legs when she went to stand beside him. She lifted the howlite pendant from the dresser, where she’d set it before her shower.

  “I kept my crystals. This one has always been my talisman. But I guess it’s nothing more than just a symbol.” She turned and sank down beside him, tying the stone around her neck. “So. This is the afterlife.”

  Tristan nodded pensively. “We’ve died, Dawn, and yet we live. That’s why they use the term undead. Our bodies still have to maintain themselves. We talk and we breathe. Our blood still flows. It’s just that everything inside us is slowed down to a near standstill, except for healing. That’s fast. It has to be fast.”

  “Like a defense mechanism?”

  “Right.”

  “But some things don’t heal as fast as a body.”

  “No.”

  Dawn wasn’t sure if she felt much different as a vampire than a human, like having a birthday and not feeling any older. Maybe she would see a change if she stood before the mirror again and allowed herself to look deeper into her own eyes. There would be no trace of the naïve, trusting innocence of youth, and no cynicism. Because she was empty. She felt nothing. The vampires had made sure of that.

  If she was still the same person she’d been as a human, she couldn’t tell that either. The emptiness numbed her. She wondered if anyone who had loved her could love her still. She wondered if this detachment would wear off eventually, leaving her cowering in a state of horror.

  She tried to grasp a shred of her old optimism. I am home. I am undamaged. I am alive.

  Mostly, she added after a moment.

  She decided she’d have to call Roy and tell him she was never coming back. First she would come up with a lie that didn’t involve her becoming a vampire. Few people were ever going to know about that.

  Looking at Tristan, she felt her gut wrench as she suddenly recalled waking up in Mineral Springs to witness his silent, heartbroken sobs. She said, “Did you know I saw you crying? In the motel room, by the window. After Branek bit me the first time.”

  He didn’t look at her. The light was changing through the window blinds, the soft gray turning yellow as morning arrived. “Oh,” he said.

  “Tell me why.”

  Their shoulders touched as he shifted slightly. “Oh, Dawn, you couldn’t understand the reasons for my tears. Even I don’t understand. Sometimes they come out of nowhere and I just let them take me over. There’s this burning pain somewhere inside me, and this pounding in my head, and I cry until they go away. Until I’m numb again.” He glanced at her. “Maybe I cried for dragging you down with me. For knowing nothing good would ever happen to you because of me.”

  “I think I’d have gone almost anywhere with you,” she said. “I’d have done anything.”

  “I manipulated you.”

  “You were manipulating yourself, too.”

  Dawn hadn’t really considered the possibility of forever with Tristan. She’d have had to consider whether she wanted to be a vampire with him. She didn’t want to be apart from him, but forever meant something different now. Being a vampire was no longer her choice to make, and forever remained in question.

  She had ideas about love that came from reading books. She knew how she wanted someone to feel about her—or she thought she did. Real life wasn’t like fiction, she knew, but she was a dreamer at heart. Anyway, her life felt like a story now. She wanted to be grand with someone. They would destroy and remake each other. There would be support and caring, loyalty and laughter, but not without anger and sadness and sometimes cruelty. Because how could anyone really love if they didn’t also hate? How could anything be good if there wasn’t something bad to balance it?

  Leila thought her ideas were quaint and hilariously unrealistic. Dawn had held on to them anyway. She didn’t know if Tristan was the one who’d fulfill her dreams and desires. All she knew was that he wasn’t good for her and she wanted him anyway. If she could have him, they’d burn together on equal ground, and she would jump happily into the fire.

  “Could you lay down with me?” she asked. “I don’t want you to hold me. I just want you beside me while I sleep.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of me anymore?”

  “Why would I be afraid of you now? I might as well fear myself.”

  “Sometimes the self is the scariest thing of all. You’ll learn that.”

  She went to her bed and lay facing the wall. He settled himself behind her. Closing her eyes, she tried not to think about regret or lost ideals. If she started imagining all the things she could have done differently to avoid this fate, she would trap herself in a mire that would be difficult to escape.

  Instead she decided she was transcendent, like a lotus flower blooming in muddy water. She had died and was not buried. Branek had not destroyed her, but awakened her into another life. If he had brought creation from destruction, then so could she. The two were intertwined, and she embodied them both. She would embrace them, life and death, and never regret either one.

  ~

  Her sleep was dreamless. She slept all day, waking as the sun went down. Just like a vampire would, she thought.

  Outside her window, the sky was electric blue in the spaces between full-bodied clouds that sizzled with go
lden edges. The sun had fallen behind the dusky purple mountains, rendering them featureless and hazy. Its melting light made the clouds blaze with startling bursts of neon pink and vibrant swaths of peach. It cast the room in a warm, romantic glow.

  Nothing felt urgent. Nothing. She and Tristan lay side by side in their own timeless world. Everything outside it could wait.

  “I haven’t kept count of the years since I became a vampire,” he told her. “It hasn’t been many, but it feels so long ago. I was the second Loftus made, years after he’d done Branek. It was … intensely uncomfortable. Maybe you can imagine,” he said as she turned over to face him, listening earnestly. “Maybe you can imagine how deeply repulsive and demeaning it felt to have a person you don’t particularly like, or even hate, suck the blood from your neck. Or touch you at all. He drained me to the point of death, and fed me the blood of his own veins to revive me. I woke up alone in the grass at the back of the house. I had this craving that felt like a ragged gash up the middle of my body. I wanted to claw my own eyes out to relieve the misery of it.”

  “What did you do?” Dawn whispered.

  “I wasn’t alone after all. I saw a girl, lying on the grass right near where I’d been. She was unconscious. She was young, maybe fifteen. And I knew she had what I needed. I could hear her heartbeat. I could smell her blood.” Tristan shifted his eyes away from hers, showing the first signs of discomfort with his story. “I already knew what to do. I’d known about vampires for a long time, and I’d known I would become one. So it wasn’t scary to want to bite her, and drink from her. I did. I was so hungry I killed her.” He blinked slowly, his eyes drifting. He added, “But it wasn’t like I’d never killed before.”

  Dawn was silent. She didn’t feel sympathy for him, yet she didn’t think less of him. She didn’t consider him a monster.

  “Do you feel sorry for yourself?” she asked.

  His lips thinned in a wry grin and his eyes were shuttered. “I have. I’ve hated myself. I’ve wanted not to kill myself, but just to die. Just to burn out. It’s been impossible to avoid feeling like that because sometimes things were just so fucking bleak.”