by Lund, S. E.
Thompson doesn't respond, whimpering, his head down. Julien circles around, closer now, his knife touching Thompson on the neck.
"That's what you are, Bob. A pervert."
Julien comes over to me where I stand frozen with horror. He pulls me over to stand in front of Thompson, one arm around me from behind, squeezing me.
"Do you recognize her?"
Thompson looks at me but shakes his head.
"No?" Julien's voice is quiet, and I realize that the more quiet his voice, the deadlier his intent. "You don't recognize sweet little Eve? Look at her – the pretty hazel eyes, the lovely soft lips, the long fair hair, the ballerina body? How could you ever forget that?"
"Whatever she told you was a lie."
Julien lets go of me and goes back to Thompson. "You're calling Eve a liar? Oh, come now, Bob. You know and I know that's a lie. My men tell me there are tapes in that pile, at least one of them with a girl in a tutu, a little girl with shiny fair hair, with such pretty hazel eyes. Why, she looks like a fucking angel, doesn't she?" Julien's voice is close to breaking. He runs the knife under Thompson’s neck, pressing it against his jugular. "Isn't that right?"
"I don't know what's there."
"Now, Bob," Julien says. "I'm going to be honest with you. Eve's already told me everything. Every ugly little detail. I want you to tell me, too, just so I know you're telling the truth. So that you and I both know what kind of animal you really are. Remember, I already know what you did. If I catch you telling a lie, something's going to get cut off, and I can assure you it will hurt."
I cover my face and turn away, unable to stand there any longer. Julien returns and holds me. "Shh," he says and strokes my head. "Just a little longer, and it will all be over."
He lets go of me and approaches Thompson once again. He bends forward and flashes the knife in the man's face.
"When did you first touch Eve in a bad way? You better tell the truth. Remember, Eve told me everything. If you lie, I'll get mad, and believe me, you don't want to see me mad." Thompson panics. He glances around as if looking for someone to help him.
"Answer me, Bob. I'm waiting."
Thompson's face is red, his mouth slobbering.
"I don't know, I don't know – maybe eleven. I'm sick. I need help."
"Oh, yes, you are sick. Very sick. But don't worry, I'm going to help you." He comes back to me. "You're a disease, Bob. And I'm the cure. Look at her. She's an angel, and because you're such a dirty pervert and hurt her, she's all messed up. Twelve years later and she's still getting screwed by you in her mind. Now that's not fair, is it?"
Thompson’s weeping, perhaps knowing there’s no way out for him.
"Answer me!"
"No!" Thompson cries.
"And all the other little girls," Julien says, his knife ripping Thompson’s pants in the crotch. "How many of them are fucked up because of you?
"I don't know," Thompson says. "Don't hurt me, please God don't hurt me!"
"Oh, God's got nothing to do with this now. God isn't going come and help you, Bob. He didn't come to help me, or Eve and he's not coming to help you. I'm the only one here, Bob. I'm your god now and it's just you and me."
I cover my face with my hands.
"Look at her!" Julien says, twisting Thompson's neck towards me. "I love her, and she needs pain to block out the memories of you! What do you think, Bob, should I hurt you?"
"No, no," he gasps, barely able to speak through the blubbering. "Please don't hurt me."
"Did Eve ask you not to hurt her?"
"I'm sorry," he cries.
Julien holds the knife under Thompson's chin. "Well Bob, it's too late for sorry now. You see, I'm here to do an exorcism. I'm here to cast the devil out. In fact, why shouldn't Eve be the one to do it? Here," he says and puts the knife in my hand, closing my fingers around it, his voice almost a whisper. "Take it. Do what I said you want to do and cut the bastard's heart out."
I just hold the knife in my hand, shaking my head, the tears rolling down my face.
"Don't," Thompson says. "Please don't."
"I can't," I say, barely able to speak.
"Didn't he hurt you, Eve? Didn't he make you hate yourself? Didn't he make it so that you can't get through a week without cutting yourself?"
"Yes."
"Doesn't he deserve to be punished? Doesn't he deserve to be stopped?"
"Yes," I say, but shake my head. "I can't."
"No, of course you can't. You're not a killer." Julien takes the knife back from me. "But I am."
He grabs Thompson's neck and twists it to the side, then bites down. I cry out, covering my face but watch through my fingers. Thompson groans, a strangled cry escaping his lips as Julien drinks his blood, almost ripping Thompson's neck apart. A moment passes before Julien stands up, his mouth and chin covered in blood. He wipes his mouth on a sleeve and then reaches down to feel Thompson's neck for a pulse. Then he turns to Vasily, who stands off to the side of the room in shadows. "Throw me your gun."
Vasily complies, and Julien catches the weapon and shoots Thompson point blank in the forehead, the force of the bullet rocking his head back. Then Julien kicks the body over onto the pile of tapes. He takes the can of gas and spreads it over everything, throws a lit match on the pile. Flames shoot up, igniting the gasoline, the fire licking at Thompson's body.
Julien takes me by the arm, leading me out of the building and to the car where Vasily stands at the ready. We drive back to the warehouse in silence, Julien just holding my hand in his, and he's released something in my brain so that I'm numb, feeling nothing.
I stand in the bedroom by the window overlooking the waterfront. Outside, the city lights across the river sparkle like a thousand crystals of yellow and white. A wind picks up and blows the stoplight on the street below back and forth. Through an open windowpane, I can hear it creak as it rocks in the wind – a lonely sound that arouses in me such a feeling of regret and sadness.
The streets in the surrounding area are bare; no traffic passes by. I realize I don't even know what time it is – I'd forgotten my watch at my apartment and haven't thought to look for it in the boxes Julien brought over.
Julien comes in, the open door throwing a sliver of light from the hall, briefly illuminating the hardwood floor. He closes it behind him and the room is once again in darkness and comes to my side.
"I'm sorry, Eve," he says. "That was difficult for you."
I feel numb, but I nod.
"Did you have permission to kill him?"
Julien shakes his head. "No," he says. "But he needed to die."
"I thought you only killed within the terms of the Treaty."
"I'm beyond that now," he says and sighs.
"What does that mean?"
He shakes his head. "Need to know, Eve."
Frustration fills me. How can I know whether to obey if I can't know why?
"I don't know if I can do this," I say when he leans against the windowsill, looking out across the skyline. "I feel so conflicted, so guilty, like being with you is wrong. Like it's a betrayal of my mother."
He says nothing, just runs his hand down from my shoulder to my hand, which he squeezes and that small show of caring makes my heart soften to him.
"It's like the world I grew up believing in doesn't really exist," I say. "It's all just a façade, and underneath is this really horrible world where monsters run things in collusion with bad humans. I always believed we lived with a system of justice. That our laws were what kept us from barbarism and arbitrary power. Without that system," I struggle to express myself. "Then, life becomes so insecure, dangerous, meaningless except for brute survival of the strongest."
"It's always been that way," he says, turning to face me and I can hear frustration in his voice. "Those laws are just meant to assuage your fears, keep you in line so that you live your lives out without causing those in power any problems. That's the truth."
"I realize that now," I say. "There is
no meaning, no reason – for anything. No universal rights. Rights are what the strong say they are. Your life and my life? Accidents. Eyeblinks in the life of the universe. Random collisions between molecules. Nothing more. Your vampire mutation? Just a random accident of random radiation and cellular biomechanics. In the long run, nature doesn't care and will probably weed it out as unfit. The universe doesn't care. Life has no meaning and all that matters is power."
"Do you really believe that?"
"I do." I run my fingers along the glass windowpane. "Events would seem to bear me out. Soren has power. He can force you to do what he wants. The rest of us are helpless and nothing we can do will change it."
We stand in silence for a moment.
"Come here," he says and takes my hand. "I want to show you something." He pulls me behind him and I resist, not wanting to talk, not wanting to think. We enter into the main room and he pulls me over to the office area. Vasily sits at a desk, watching the monitors, playing solitaire on his computer.
"Can you excuse us for a while?" Julien says.
Vasily stands and leaves without a word.
Julien sits at a desk, an old oak dinosaur, the top worn and scratched. He opens a file drawer and searches through a dozen files in a holder.
"Here it is," he says, pulling out a worn folder, thick with contents. He opens it on the desk and on the top is a folded image from a glossy magazine. The edges and folds are worn from repeated use. It must have been folded and unfolded hundreds of times.
Spread out, the image is of a dark sky with what appears to be thousands of tiny blurs of light. I lean closer and see that amidst the points of light are small galaxies resembling images of the Milky Way I've seen before, some on their side, some face on, yellow, white, pink, blue.
"Is that the whole universe?" I say in awe. "There are thousands of galaxies."
He shakes his head and touches the image, his fingers running over it almost with reverence.
"No. This was taken of the emptiest part of the night sky. It's called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Image. If you held your hand up at arm's length, the area of the night sky they studied for this would cover only the tip of your little finger."
I lean over and examine it more closely. Galaxies of every conceivable size, shape and color are strewn against a black background. In the middle, one large bright star, its light refracted into points.
"I never knew there were so many."
"Each one of those specks? They aren't stars, Eve. They're galaxies with hundreds of millions of stars." He pulls me down so that I sit on his lap, his arms around me and although I want to resist, he prevents me.
"Look at it. That," he says, pointing to the bright star in the center of the image. "That is the only star. The rest are galaxies. The star's close – maybe thousands of light-years away in our own galaxy. The galaxies? Millions of light-years away. There are billions of galaxies. Each one has hundreds of millions of stars. They took that image from that position because they thought it was empty. Look at what they found in the emptiest part of the sky. Imagine that image taken and repeated to cover the entire sky."
He looks down at the image and shakes his head.
"There are too many stars – too many for us to be skeptical of the existence of God. Humans create such beauty and wonder that I can't believe that there's no meaning, no purpose. God may be beyond any of our puny minds but I do believe God exists, Eve. If I didn't, I couldn't imagine existence."
He squeezes me.
I don't want to hear his philosophy. I want to crawl into the bed and pull the covers over my head, block out the real world.
"That's so anthropocentric," I say, repeating some word I've learned in a class at university, never having a reason to even use it before. "What about all the other animals?"
"You can't compare that way, Eve. They're like steps on a ladder to us. The universe is billions of years old and in all that time it's been moving towards us. You've studied science. You should see it clearly – increasing physical complexity starting with hydrogen and helium, all the way to the creation of biological life and then consciousness, and finally an intelligence that can actually see back to the beginning. And now one that's immortal. It's like we are the universe's consciousness and given immortality, what can we do? It's limitless."
"That's a beautiful thought," I say and shake my head, my breath catching in my throat. "I thought you wanted all vampires dead. I can't believe it. It's too self-serving, to see us as the reason for the universe to exist."
"God put us here for a reason," he says. "I don't want all vampires dead. Just those who want Dominion."
"Evolution put you here and it doesn't care about us."
"You Atheists are so brave, able to exist in a Godless universe," he says and squeezes me. "I know there's a God, although my faith has been challenged at times." He's silent for a moment. "I don't believe in the Church any longer, but I know that what it claims about the divine is real."
I look at him, at the white skin, and I remember the story of his making, and how he was taken off the battlefield, turned in the tent where medics tended the wounded, then transformed in the old castle. I take his face in my hands, and imagine him as a child, with dark hair, those huge blue eyes, praying to a god who never answered and yet he still believes, even now, and something breaks inside of me – I can almost feel it crack, rip apart.
I lean down and kiss him, pressing my lips against his, the kiss remaining chaste, the connection between us forming as our lips meet.
"I want you," I say.
"Not tonight."
"Why?"
He shakes his head, his face solemn. "Obedience, Eve. Just obey."
"Are you going out?"
He nods. "Yes. I can't tell you about it."
Then he stands and I extract myself from his arms. He lets me go.
I go to my bed, my knees weak, a choky feeling gripping my chest, and creep under the covers, closing my eyes.
I'm too tired to even cry.
I don't care any longer about this vampire war. I don't want vengeance. I don't feel any better with Thompson dead. It won't make what happened disappear.
"
Chapter 40
Do not seek the because - in love there is no because, no reason, no explanation, no solutions."
Anaïs Nin
THE NEXT DAY DAWNS GREY, overcast. I sit up in bed and through the open bedroom door, I watch as Vasily and Julien stand outside the office space and speak in hushed voices. I wondered if Julien ever sleeps and where he does, because after that night we had sex, he hasn't joined me in bed. I get up and go to the bathroom. In need of a shower, I step inside and the hot water that falls in a cascade over me from the huge showerhead stings.
When I'm finished, I dry off and search through the box of clothes, selecting a clean pair of jeans and a sweater. Brushing my fine hair is hard, for it tangles so easily, but after a few minutes of effort, it's tangle-free. I look at my reflection in the mirror. I look the same, with the exception of the scabbed cut on my forehead and the now-fading bruise on my cheek, but I'm not the same person inside.
I go to the kitchen and eat with little interest for there's a kind of emptiness inside me that feels like nausea. There's coffee in a coffeepot but I can't face it with my stomach the way it is. I drink some juice instead.
I wander to the piano and sit down, touching a few keys hesitantly, not really sure that I feel like playing. Usually my solace, now every piece I know just makes me feel incredibly sad. Instead of playing, I sit and stare out the window at the grey clouds scudding across the sky.
A noise from the entrance draws my attention away from the windows. A few of Julien's men come inside. He speaks with them, and then they leave. Julien returns to his office, retrieves a canvas bag. He stops near the exit and drops his bag, then comes over to me as I sit at the piano. He takes my hand and leads me away, over to a couch in the seating area.
He sits and pulls me down
on his lap so that I straddle his hips, and I rest my hands on his shoulders. His arms slip around my waist, pulling me closer. There's nowhere for me to look except in his eyes.
He says nothing for a moment, just looks at me, touches my hair, holds it up to his face and inhales.
"I'm going now," he says, his voice quiet. "There are plans in place. The game's afoot."
"What are you going to do?"
He shakes his head.
"I can't tell you details, but it's big. Look, I don't have much time. Once the clock starts, we have everything mapped out in thirty second intervals, and I have," he said and glances at his watch, "about two minutes and thirty seconds left. But if I succeed and make it back," he says and squeezes me, "there'll be one less threat towards you."
"If you make it back?" I shake my head.
"There's always the chance when a soldier goes into battle that he'll die. I'm not expecting it," he says, and runs his fingers through my hair. "But just in case, I wanted to tell you something."
I shake my head, not sure if I want to hear it, whatever it is.
"I want you to know," he says, taking my hand in his, "that I wanted you from the moment I saw you in the diner." His fingers trace my bottom lip. "I was ready to break all my own rules for you. It hurt to even look at you. So delicate, so lovely, and so in danger from us monsters. You just really don't have any idea." He takes in a breath, holds it, then lets it escape slowly. "At first, it was just lust. There you were, so pretty, so young and fresh. I felt like such a," he says nothing, shakes his head. "Like such a monster compared to you. You're so good. I don't deserve you."
I try to pull away from him, feeling too much emotion rising in me, tears stinging in the corners of my eyes. I've cried too much. Too much. I bite my lip to stop.
"When I heard you play piano that first day you were in the warehouse, you had me." He touches my cheek. "I want to say this to you before I go. I may not ever be able to say it again."
I turn my head away, feeling like I'm at the breaking point.