by DL Atha
The rise and fall of his chest picked up even more than when he had climbed from the trailer and I could smell the fear oozing from his armpits. He mouthed my mother’s name once as he tried in vain to pierce the darkness with his human eyes and just seeing those syllables on his lips brought my rage to new heights. How dare he utter her name!
But then I realized that to him from this distance I might look like her ghost. Mom and I were both of medium build with streaming black hair that fell to our waists. She had been a hair shorter than me but not by much. I had her eyes and her lips and now I had the pale skin of death. It was her specter that tormented him and I wished I had thought of the idea myself as he began to run wildly for the road. I cut him off at his driveway as I materialized from the thin air to stand in front of him.
“I want to talk to you, Joel,” I said in Russian knowing that it would trigger unwanted memories. Mom had never deigned to speak English to him. He bolted backwards, his mouth slack-jawed and his eyes wide, before he finally turned his back to me and dashed without thinking into the blackness of the forest.
I let him run wildly into the woods as it was exactly where I wanted him to go before I took to the trees, skimming their great tangle of limbs in pursuit, while he careened out of control on the forest floor beneath me. He attempted to stick to the trail and he did for the most part except when I flew slowly enough from one tree to another that I appeared like a ghost at random moments and then he would crash to the ground.
Two times he fell so hard, his feet entangling in a tree root, that I thought he would not get up but fear propelled him on and his fingers dug into the wet ground for purchase before he managed to claw his way to standing and continue his wild run into the night.
The trail led him round the side of the mountain for a couple of miles before joining with another trail that led towards town. Joel stopped here at the fork in the trail as he did not have the breath to go another foot farther and he searched the darkness for the specter that chased him. Unable to find me, he did not fight the fatigue this time when his legs went out from under him. I watched from the tree tops as he lay on his belly, his head turned to the side with his eyes closed. His chest heaved for air and I could hear the pound of his heart against the ground under his chest.
When he opened his eyes again, I was on my knees beside him in the snow. He started at my presence and pushed backwards looking for footing but the slick of his shoes gave way in the snow and he dropped back down onto his back again.
“Lena,” he whispered unbelieving into the dark as he stared up at my face.
I leaned in closer so he could see my features more clearly. “You know she’s dead. You killed her.”
His eyes widened for a moment before he blew his breath out harshly into my face. He smelled of coffee, cigarette smoke, and fear. Pissed off when he realized it was just me, he slapped the ground in anger with his right hand before raising it to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “Tam, you fricking scared the shit out of me.”
I smiled at his stupidity. How quickly he had forgotten what had pursued him from the trailer and he’d brushed my mention of Mom’s death aside as if I hadn’t spoken at all.
“Why aren’t you scared now?” I asked, innocently.
“I thought I saw something. Like a ghost or something. But I guess it was just you.”
“Like my mom’s ghost, Joel? And seeing me instead made you feel better. But why?”
Still struggling to catch his breath, Joel screwed his face up at me in confusion. “What the fuck are you talking about? You must have lost your damned mind chasing me through this godforsaken wasteland. It’s forty below and you’re sitting here babbling asking why I’m not scared anymore. Why on God’s green earth would I be scared of a little piece of crap like you?”
“Because you should be. You know, Mom would have had far more mercy on you than me,” I responded not really listening to his words. I was speaking more for my benefit than his.
“Your Momma got what was coming to her, Tam,” Joel whispered leaning in close to me as if we weren’t alone and the forest was full of ears. “All she had to do was tell me where you were and I would have walked away. But no, she had to play the martyr.”
“It’s sort of funny, Joel, that you believe in ghosts but don’t consider the possibility that I’ve changed,” I said continuing my part in our tangential conversation.
“Changed? You? You were the most predictable piece of this entire game, Tam. All you had to do was disappear when you left me. Drop your mom a one liner and skedaddle and I would have never found you. But you were too selfish. You had to make your peace with her instead of leaving her in peace.”
“The only peace I’ve had since I met you was the day I left. Then you stole it when you took my mom but tonight I’m going to get it back. So I want you to run Joel. You really need to run and hope to God that the smell of the fear in your blood makes me so crazy that I won’t be able to remember everything you’ve done and I end up killing you far more quickly than I want. Or else it’s going to be a very long, miserable night for you.”
I pulled him roughly to his feet before he realized I had grabbed his arm. His skin was warm against mine and under my thumb I could feel the swell of his still racing pulse. I swallowed hard, forcing the rage back down. Letting my head drop back slightly, I pushed my fangs forward from my gums as I parted my lips just enough that Joel could glimpse their tips.
“I want you to feel something,” I said pulling his head to my chest. He struggled against my hand on his neck and nearly lost his balance, his arms splaying out to his sides like a man on a tightrope, but I held him upright, his ear against my skin.
“Feel,” I demanded again and his body went still except for the working of his lungs and his eyes twitching back and forth as his brain tried to rationalize what was happening. “What do you hear? Do you feel anything?”
Nothing moved around us. The forest was silent, the wild animals having recognized the presence of a stronger predator, and the only sound that littered the night air was the whisper of the wind and the full rich hum of Joel’s heart paired with his irregular breathing. He listened in earnest this time and I caught his sharp intake of air when he realized my chest was dead quiet. Not a breath stirred. Not a single heartbeat.
He began to back slowly away from me, his hands slithering up and pushing against my belly as he struggled to break my hold. I let him go, laughing wildly at the look on his face. Joel was staring fixedly at me, half believing but arguing with logic that this couldn’t be happening. He looked like he belonged in that famous painting of the man on the bridge screaming with the sky on fire behind him, his silent mouth formed into a desperate ‘O’ and his hands drawn up alongside his face.
“Run, Joel,” I whispered and pointed into the mountains and for once in his miserable life he didn’t argue but instead took one last look at me and sprinted away and into the darkness of the forest.
My every instinct said to pursue him. The sight of him running from me and the taste of his fear drifting through the air stirred something that was almost uncontrollable. The thrill of pursuit, I suppose, which has brought every predator to bear since the beginning of life as we know it. It’s the reason you don’t turn your back on a growling dog or run from a horse in an open pasture. Seeing the backside of someone as they turn tail will bring out the beast in the best of us.
But while my gut screamed to bring him down immediately, my logical mind urged me to wait. To let him get some distance ahead. To let his fear rise and grow until he could hardly reason. So instead of pursuing him, I climbed the mountain that loomed behind me while I waited.
The climb was quick and soon ended in a jutted shelf where I stretched out and surveyed the town of Sitka below me. The city spread out as a cluster of dim lights along the shore. One side open to the sea and the other three hemmed in by mountain peaks that thrust sharply towards Heaven.
In the distance, the now dormant volc
ano, Mount Edgecumbe, stood shrouded in mists as she leapt from the ocean floor and the full moon hung dull beside the mountain crest, too obscured by expectant gray clouds to be of much use.
In the valley, a church spire stood tall and straight. As a human, I could barely have made it out from this distance but as a vampire, I could see the shape and strength of the metal as it mingled with the mists. The steeple belonged to Peter’s church, the same church Mom had attended, and seeing it made me think of my friend.
I missed Peter. I missed his friendship and I missed the opportunity of what we could have become and I couldn’t keep from wondering if he missed me too? I pictured him as I expected him to be. Leaned back in his Dad’s high backed rocking chair with his feet stretched out towards the fire. A steaming cup of coffee mixed with a little Bailey’s to his right and a Bible spread out in his hands with his notes for tomorrow’s service between two chapters, reading while the rain tapped a comforting staccato on the roof of his family home.
That’s how I wanted to remember him, safe and warm in his home doing the things he had been born to do, and I wanted him to remember me the way I had been meant to be. Before Joel scarred me forever. Before I sold my soul for revenge.
Luckily Peter would never see me as I was now, I thought to myself, as I stood and dropped off the side of the mountain cliff fifty feet to the ground below and turned in the direction that Joel had fled. Luckily, Peter would never see me as I would look tonight with Joel’s blood spread like banners across my skin. Secure in the knowledge that Peter was safe and putting him out of my mind, I started in the direction that Joel had went.
I found him with no trouble; it was too easy actually. There wasn’t any sport in it at all. Not that I expected it to be. It’s hard to outrun and out maneuver a vampire in the darkest hours of the night. He was huddled under a large log that had been felled several years ago by the looks of the weathered bark. He was shaking, his fear billowing out like clouds of smoke from a damp fire into the cold clean air. A beacon that was impossible to miss.
He never heard me coming and so I caught him unawares as I jerked him feet first out from under the log. His screams were hoarse as if he’d been crying and his hands clawed desperately for anything to clutch but could finding nothing. Flipping him over on to his back, I pushed him down into the snow with one bare foot as he raked my legs with his broken fingernails.
“Tam,” he mouthed through gritted teeth once he quit screaming. “Please.”
“I liked it better when you were screaming,” I said as I grabbed the hair of his head and began to drag him further up the mountain. “I remember screaming quite a bit when the shoe was on the other foot.”
“What happened to you!” he shrieked, his body bouncing harshly on broken rocks and jutting tree limbs as I drug him behind me.
“You happened to me,” I answered calmly, turning around to stare at his stricken face. “You turned me into this.”
“Into what? This isn’t possible. Into what?” he kept repeating.
“That will be the best part, Joel, because you when you come to yourself, you won’t even know what hit you. They say ignorance is bliss but in this case, I don’t think that’s true.”
“When I come to? So you’re not going to kill me?” he asked desperately.
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be so literal. Bad choice of words. Of course, I’m going to kill you but I’m going to do so much worse and the best part is that the worst part will never end. It’ll just keep going and going and going.”
I drug him the rest of the way up the mountain while he alternated between crying and begging for mercy. It wasn’t until I stopped at the edge of a sharp mountain crag that his voice died away. For the first time, I think he realized where we were. I pulled him upright to a standing position and leaned him far out over the rocky outcropping so that he could see the valley below. He was shaking so hard he lost bladder control and his urine poured out his pants leg, staining the snow at his feet.
“You don’t have to do this, Tam,” Joel pleaded as he eyed the valley below, unable to look away. “Please. I’m sorry for everything I did to you. Sorry about Lena. I didn’t want to kill her.”
I jerked him upright so that his face was inches from my bared fangs. I hissed in his face, “Don’t speak her name. Don’t you dare ever speak her name and I don’t want to hear any more of your lies. I want to hear you beg. I want to hear my name gurgling in the blood pooling in your throat.”
“You’ll never get the satisfaction out of me,” he sneered, pretending bravery just moments after begging for his life. I guess he had realized this wasn’t going to end well, no matter what he said.
I smirked at his bravado. “I promise I will,” I said and then I lost myself while I slipped the skin from his body in long streamers, tasting his blood as I went. His bones turned to sawdust in my hands and his nerve endings flamed in my fingers. His organs dissolved with my touch. And I was true to my word. His cries for mercy were harrowing. Even to me.
But the night was simply too short to make up for all of the evil he had done and some people should suffer for an eternity. So when at last, his exhausted heart could find little else to pump out, I slipped my fangs deep into his neck and cursed him with the kiss of immortality. With one final act of revenge, I leaned his still conscious body over the edge of the cliff where Mom’s last moments of life had been spent watching him as she fell to her death.
“I want my face to be the last thing you see while you fall. Like yours was for her,” I said as I flipped him over so that he was facing me. Nothing touched his back except the caress of the wind coming from the canyon below.
He was angry now and resigned, I guess, to dying. His previous shock at his nearing death was gone. Now there was only hatred. “I should have killed you the night I caught you at preacher boy’s house. I’ve had a hundred opportunities but I was trying to give you another chance to come home.”
“You only wanted another chance to control me, Joel. But those days are over.”
He laughed at me then, blood flying from his mouth into the wind. “I’m still controlling you, Tam. Just look at what you did to get back at me. Nothing’s changed. I always said we would be together forever. Turns out, I was…” His last words converted to a scream as I thrust him off into eternity.
I just couldn’t listen to him say he was right.
I buried him in the woods close to where he had been staying but not before I wrapped him in tow chains from his truck and staked those chains to the ground. I shoved a crowbar through his heart and deep into the ground underneath him and then I passed every other tool I could find in his truck through his chest and belly until his body looked like a pincushion. Through his eyes, I drove two long tree branches. I put rocks in his mouth so that his parched throat would have no rest when he awoke. With two more metal tools, I dropped them into place so that they formed the Cross upon his chest, happy that his skin would be afire for the life of the metal.
I filled in the grave, satisfied that his suffering would be eternal.
Joel’s body was cooling in the ground, and I danced through the forest, drunk on his blood and strength. The forest was alive around me, and I’d never been more alert to all of its wonders than now in the glow of my most savored kill.
The lush ferns caressed my bare feet as I raced from one side of the island to the other, stopping only when my feet dipped into the icy waters of the Pacific Ocean. I scaled first one mountain and then another, passing through the ring of near frozen clouds encircling the great peaks to bow before the great white moon that turned my skin a more unnatural shade of white.
How beautiful and glorious to be standing on that mountain with the blood of my enemy on my hands. Below, I could see nothing but billowing clouds stretching on for as far as my eyes could see. Above, the Milky Way twisted across the sky in a brilliant glow of whites and blues, competition for the stark white of the moon.
It was only when my skin b
egan to crystallize in the frozen air of the mountain that I decided to leave. The blood high was waning, and I now wanted to lie in the arms of my lover in my own bed before the sun drove us to the paralyzed condition we hated. So I pirouetted one last time on the mountain peak, whispering my goodbyes to the moon and dove back down the side of the mountain, using the giant crags as stepping stones.
Chapter 19
Joel’s blood was still frozen in a thin layer across my skin when I took my first step out of the dense perimeter of forest bordering my house. I was jittery with excitement to share Joel’s suffering with Adrik but before my first footfall struck the yard, I knew something was terribly wrong. I froze in place and drank deeply of the night wind. Blood laced the air too strongly, a perfect mixture of testosterone and iron intertwined with terror. I recognized the scent. My mouth watered, and at the same time, my belly cramped low in my pelvis.
The evening was nearly silent except for the gasp of an injured man. The sound reached out from my home through the darkness to bring me to my knees. I recognized it immediately and I had no choice but to lock my legs and cling to a nearby tree for support. The thought of facing what I knew was happening behind the walls of my mom’s house made me want to turn and bolt into the woods, but I could hardly leave Peter to face Adrik alone. The first step towards the porch was hard, and the second was even worse and by the time I reached the porch, I was shaking with fear.
The door to the living room stood ajar and from where I stood on the porch, I could see Peter slipping in a small pool of his own blood, his left foot sliding out from under him. His nails skittered across the hardwoods as he struggled to pull himself up. A large gash ran the length of his right arm, and warm bright blood dripped from his index finger onto the floor. The ancient wood soaked it up like nectar.