by DL Atha
The rain had passed for the moment as we climbed the steps to my house. Entering through the back door, we were careful to wipe our feet on the dirt-crusted rug outside. Peter, despite his promise, had come to check on the house several times. It was important that he not know I was still here so I certainly couldn’t leave my footprints all over the house. But how nice it was to be here, in my own home, and to not have to ask permission to enter.
I could smell Peter; his fresh scent marking the doorways and the kitchen counter. Adrik noticed too, his nostrils flaring as he picked up the scent.
“He has been here again. He is becoming a nuisance,” Adrik derided me from the kitchen. “We will have to deal with him soon.”
Twice now, Adrik had risen from our daylight confinement to find that Peter had been to my house. Tonight, Peter’s scent burned a path of longing through my veins that made my head spin and my dead heart ache. I traced his path through the house, caressing the wooden doorframe he’d leaned against and buried my face in the jacket he’d forgotten on the coat tree in the corner of the living room.
Tonight, Peter’s scent lingered heavily around a small hallway table that held the family Bible. Although I couldn’t touch the holy book, I held my hand above the pages, wondering what he’d found so interesting here. There was nothing unusual about the Bible except that it was old. My family had used it to record our lineage for generations. When Peter and I were children, Mom had read from it to us in Russian.
Beside the Bible, a few relics that Mom had kept lay around the family heirloom, a wooden cross hand-carved by a native man who lived in town and some beautiful beads from an ancestor’s long since dilapidated wedding gown. Certainly nothing special and nothing that should pique Peter’s interest.
I turned my attention back to the Bible again. Tonight, it was open to the pages listing my family tree, and I read the familiar names that had never meant anything to me despite Mom’s best efforts. The first few names on either side were ancient Russian names whose birth dates and death dates were presumptions only. Dad’s side of the family had originated with Yegor Semenov, the same surname as the owner of the journal and blood and I whispered a quiet thank you to him for saving his family’s possessions.
Mom’s family had originated in Russia as well. Her first ancestor to be buried in Alaska was named Ivan Korovin. It was this line that had intermarried with the Tlingit many generations back.
From the concentration of his scent, Peter had spent considerable time studying my family tree. His scent had imbedded in everything around the table. A pencil lay beside the Bible as if he’d been taking notes, and a nearby notepad was laced with the perfume of his skin. I’d picked the paper up, planning to take it to the grave with me that night. Lost in thought, I didn’t notice Adrik watching me. He was leaning against the doorframe when I turned around, still holding the pad of paper with Peter’s scent to my face.
“What was he doing here?” Adrik asked. “What interests him so in that Bible?”
“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “He’s a preacher. All Bibles interest him I guess.
Adrik raised his eyebrows skeptically at me. “I think his interest lies more in you, Tamara.”
“Maybe. But he’s lost to me now. I chose this life over him, and I have no regrets.”
“He does not think you are lost to him, or he would not keep coming here. You cannot leave here for six months, which makes us very vulnerable. If he continues to be so inquisitive, Peter will become a problem that we must deal with.”
“Peter is my friend. He’s done nothing wrong. Besides, he can help you,” I said across the darkness of the room. “He’s the same to me as Ivan was to you. We cannot hurt him.”
“You are the only help I want,” he said, leveling his gaze at me.
Adrik was wet—we both were—from our hike home through the woods. Beads of water clung to the dark lashes rimming his blue eyes, like lush ferns lining the blue of a mountain spring. They brimmed with hunger. It was our first night together after I’d risen. He’d lain with me each evening, patiently awaiting my waking.
“You are thirsty. I was selfish with the blood tonight,” I said. “I see the hunger in your eyes. I should have offered some to you.”
“I have had the blood of another since I first laid you in the earth,” he murmured, his eyes growing hungrier. “But the remembrance of your blood lingers still on my tongue. And the feel of your skin.”
Thirst and desire flared in me again, but this time from deep in my groin. It flared up and outwards until I felt it tingle down into my thighs and up into my chest. Blood danced on my tongue as well. Peter’s scent skipped across the air between us, an aphrodisiac even to me, who loved him so dearly.
The kitchen was no place to indulge the thirsts that teased us both now. The living room seemed a more appropriate place. Logs from one of my last human chores lay stacked neatly in the corner next to the fireplace, and soon a roaring fire blazed, warming the blanket-covered floor for the two of us whose skin was cool to the touch.
I was filthy. It seemed Adrik had figured out the concept of running water and had helped himself to a few old clothes of my father’s. At least, I thought I recognized them. No invitation was needed to my house as it was not owned by the living.
I still carried the dirt of the grave and more than a little of the detective’s blood, and so I pulled him with me to the shower. He may have understood how to turn the sink on for a quick sponge bath, but his eyes went wide with the warm water streaming from the showerhead. It was a glorious feeling to step under that hot flow and let it wash away the layers of filth that clung to my skin.
The shower was small, but after I was certain that every speck of blood and dirt had washed down the drain, I pulled Adrik into the enclosed space with me. He hissed sharply as the hot water slapped his back the first time and tried to sidestep from the unusual sensation.
Laying my hands on the smooth muscles of his chest, I forced him back into the water, feeling with my fingers the warmth working through him until it spread up through the pads of my fingers splayed across his chest.
He watched, at first apprehensively, as I lathered my hands up with the soap and spread it across the firm muscles of his chest. My fingers worked his skin and muscles harshly and layers of grime from two centuries fell in sheets to the bottom of the shower, leaving pale smooth skin in its wake.
Lifting upward on my toes, I washed his shoulder-length hair, the water running through it to cross his forehead and fall heavily across the fullness of his red lips. Becoming accustomed to the sensation of the water, he tilted his head back farther, letting the stream hit him full in the face. His fangs were bared, his lips parted. I watched as water streamed across his mouth and followed the contours from his angled jaw to his smooth chest. It hung in the hair of his belly and trickled farther south, and I hurried to finish washing him.
The blankets were hot to the touch as we settled down in front of the fire, the colors of the flames rippling across our wet skin. We seemed the perfect combination tonight. He was full of lust for body and blood. My willingness to give him both was evident on my face as he reached a hand towards my naked breasts.
Splaying one large hand across first one and then the other, he sucked in unneeded breaths as his fingertips met my fire-warmed skin. My nipples puckered as he fingers traced their shape. Leaning backwards on my arms, I tipped them into his now eager hands, and he lost his tentative touch, kneading my breasts harshly.
Droplets of water from our previous shower dripped from his head onto my belly as he leaned his head across my chest to take a nipple into his mouth. He bit first one and then the other. Lifting his head, he caught sight of the water drops trickling down my belly. A flick of his tongue caught them before they reached my belly button. His eyes slid to the dark triangle where my thighs met my body.
Still leaning back, I spread my knees somewhat as he rubbed first one finger and then two into my
closely clipped hair. He pushed my knees a little farther apart with his hands as he reached his fingers down to trace the valleys that he couldn’t see.
His fingers slid into me, and I moaned slightly as he began to move them in and out, his thumb massaging me outwardly. With his other hand, he lifted my body up, and in between strokes of his fingers, he slid the length of his cock into me. I hissed lightly in response as my every nerve ending lit up from my pelvis to my core.
In the light of the fire, his muscles strained with his desire as he thrust into me. I wrapped my legs around him, forcing him deeper with each flex of my feet. His lust was building with his every stroke, as was mine, and I could feel the vibrations of his orgasm building deep within him.
Sitting back on his heels, he pulled me to straddle across him and with two more strokes, I took the virginity of this supposed rapist as he came forcefully into me. He buried his fangs deeply into the juncture of my neck and shoulder and drank until the contractions in my pelvis had stopped. I would have to feed again soon so strong was our moment.
There are some memories that are eternal, I think, remaining as bright and vivid in your mind as the day they were experienced. Like the first time I kissed Peter. His lips were soft and his hands warm as they cupped my face. I was human then, sensations not quite as strong, but that quick touch of his lips will warm me forever. In the same way, the taste of my initial kill and the feel of Adrik’s arms encircling my waist on my first risen night will never fade.
Chapter 18
The Roman philosopher Seneca once said that revenge is an inhuman word. He was later sentenced to death by suicide by the dictator Nero. How ironic that he chose death by exsanguination and slit his wrists before stepping into a hot water spring where he bled his life’s blood out. The quote had made little sense to me when I had first began to study philosophy but now I saw it with new clarity. Revenge had, after all, stripped me of any shred of compassion I had left for Joel. If a trace of connection to him had existed in me, it had poured out the same as Seneca’s blood the night I committed myself to this path.
Certainly, I didn’t feel very human as I looked down from the waving spruce trees at the squat travel trailer clinging to the edge of the mountain. It was crowded onto a littered irregular lot with a tiny rectangular storage shed and an old rusted out jeep. I doubted it was more than twenty feet long and eight feet wide and it sat humped against the wind and surrounded by a variety of tools needed to debride the trees from the side of a mountain. Joel’s car, I recognized it from the night he had trapped me in my yard, set a few feet away.
Like a cat, I hid precariously but effortlessly along the length of a tree limb, unaffected by the ice coating the bark. Neither did I look human suspended here above the ground, my straight, black hair waving in the cold wind that shook small clods of snow off limbs and dumped them onto the ground beneath my perch.
Several lots had been cleared out on this side of the mountain but so far none of them were occupied except the one below me. Joel was working up here; most likely in exchange for free room and board while he cleared the trees to make room for a level house pad. Sitka was growing and eventually these lots would sell and homes would be built, even if they were only tourist or summer housing. And when they were completed, riff-raff like Joel would have to move on.
But tonight, it was just him and me alone on this mountain, the face of which grinned headlong into the wind. Adrik had left an hour ago as I had stretched out on the tree limb about fifty feet up the eastern face of a large bodied Spruce tree and I remained exactly as he had left me, blending into the dark tangle of limbs.
Below, Joel sat protected in the metal shell, exhaust fumes boiling from a stack in the roof of the mobile home. His lights glared on the freshly fallen snow, and I could make out every word of the TV show he watched above the whistle of the wind. He had disappeared into the house shortly after Adrik and I arrived, reappearing only to throw the browned filter from a cigar out into the yard marring the perfection of the snow. His littering only made me hate him more, if that were possible.
His scent had filled my nose and despite my hatred of him, I could not help but appreciate the beauty of his flavors. Testosterone, which Joel had in spades, has such a pleasant aroma and I inhaled of him deeply and let him flow down into my lungs and wash across my every sense. Even now, the flavor still lingered in the air. My mouth watered, filling with the sweet anticipation of what Joel would taste like.
I had watched him nightly now since I first rose, well over a week ago. Frankly, I had surprised myself that I had managed to keep him alive so long. My last living thought had been of his death and as my mind began to wake from crossing over death, the same thought had consumed me.
Tonight would be perfect timing. I was thirsty but not out of control and I had spent the last week remembering all the reasons I hated Joel. His every slap, his cold words, my mother’s death. I dredged up each bad memory, reliving them again and again while the sun held me captive in the ground.
No matter how bad the memories hurt, I focused on the way his hands had felt wrapped around my neck the first time I had made him really angry. I forced myself to remember the touch of his hands on my back each time he pushed me over the footboard of the bed and the humiliation of seeing myself in the mirror when I was so helpless.
My transformation to vampire had left me immortal and strong but it could not suppress the buddings of fear that built up in the pit of my belly while I re-lived the worst of my human moments nor did it keep my heart from aching as I imagined how my beautiful mother had felt freefalling to the earth. But the transformation did bring me ripping my way through the earth in a glorious rage on my first night as vampire and the sun would never protect Joel again.
The snow had stopped; the clouds curling away to reveal a brightly starred sky as I swung my legs over the side of the tree limb I was draped across and dropped to the ground. Out of habit, I bent my knees with the impact, landing quietly in the snow. I was barefooted and my tracks were small in the white blanket covering the ground.
The mountain was quiet tonight with the exception of the noise from the inane reality show Joel was watching. The wind had died down since I arrived and a bird that had been calling from deep within the forest had slipped so far away I could no longer hear it. The smoke from Joel’s cigar oozed out from around the windows, the smell intermingling with gas fumes from the exhaust. The scent of boiling coffee joined in the fray.
I walked quietly to the door of the trailer, still not quite certain of what I was going to do to him but as I raised my hand to knock, I decided I just didn’t have it in me to be civil and hope for an invitation. Instead, I placed my hands under the frame of the trailer and felt around until the strong metal braces that supported the floor cut into my hand.
The trailer was relatively small and it took very little effort to flip the metal box onto its side. From within, I heard the surprised shriek of a man caught unawares as the furniture flew topsy-turvy around him. The smell of slightly charred skin mixed with the smell of coffee wafted through the air. The lights to the camper flickered once before the electricity gave up its connection and everything went black and the fumes became stronger as the gas from the broken pipe feeding the mobile home leeched into the air.
Inside, I could hear Joel shuffling as he struggled to pull himself upright. His shrieks had turned to cool curses as he realized he had survived and I waited, less than patiently, as he located the now oddly positioned door and climbed out. I laughed a little at the doomed man who poked his head out of the camper like a worm from the dirt and peered nervously around in the dark.
No doubt Joel thought he had been hit by a blow down from the mountain. Wind events like that did happen and it was not unheard of to lose a vehicle or a mobile home to one. Cursing the weather that he had always hated, Joel slowly climbed out of the trailer before patting himself down and sighing with relief when his hands came away without any blood. It was on
ly then that he noticed the burns on his right arm where the coffee had hit him and he cursed again as he pulled his sleeve down to protect the injured skin.
He surveyed the damage walking two steps to his right and then another three steps to the left, his hands rubbing backwards from his cheeks to his neck while he gathered his wits. From a distance, I watched, amused at his discomfort. “Well shit,” he finally expounded into the darkness before kicking the bottom of the trailer that now faced the air rather than the ground.
For a moment, Joel resumed cursing the weather and Alaska before he pulled his cell phone out and then kicked the ground with his boot when he realized the cell phone service didn’t reach this far up the mountain. “Dammit,” he cursed again as he slammed the phone shut. Still shook up, he turned towards his car and then remembered the keys were in the trailer. He was having one of those nights and I smiled knowing it was going to get worse.
I could tell by the look on his face he was considering crawling back into the trailer but the smell of propane was strong and finding the keys in the swirled contents of the trailer would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. One more curse word slipped out of his mouth before he turned dejectedly towards town. I guess he was going to walk back but I saved him the effort and stepped out of the tree line from where I was watching him.
He saw me standing starkly against the backdrop of the forest that shrouded the small yard and he jerked back, stumbling, but managed to keep his balance at the last moment. I understood why he was spooked. I had not looked for my reflection in the mirrors of my house, too scared I would not see one, but I could see the unnatural paleness of my skin and how it gleamed in the partial moonlight almost like marble. I could feel the strength of my muscles and see my hair snaking across my near naked shoulders for since I felt no cold, I had worn the less restrictive clothes of summer.
A specter in the woods, I stood perfectly still while he blinked hard, once, to check his eyes but when he opened them I was gone and I watched him from the heights of the trees while he whirled around searching the darkness for where I might have went.