The Night Within Us: Dark Vampire Romance
Page 4
“Go on,” Airas challenged me to stab him in the guts with the knife he used for carving.
“I can't,” I repeated and lowered the knife. After our previous tests, I was pretty sure he wouldn't die if I did. Still, I couldn't possibly stick him in the stomach with the knife. I had scruples about it, because I couldn't reconcile it with my conscience.
“Come on. We have to find out.”
“Why?”
“Because. . . because it's important.” Airas's eyes gleamed feverishly.
“Hadn't we better tell Mom or Dad first? It's not normal for us to be this way.”
“No.” He shook his head emphatically and then snarled, “You swore it'd be our secret. No word about it, to nobody.”
I hung my head helplessly, only to raise it again straight away and look at him. “Couldn't we try it another time then? Not today, please.”
He snorted, annoyed, and stamped his foot. “I should have known a girl would chicken out. It would have been a whole different story with a brother.”
His words got me right in the heart. Like a tongue of flame, a feeling blazed up inside me for a moment, making my cheeks glow with the heat and my heart race. Determined, I pressed my lips together and watched as I suddenly lifted the knife, blade down, clasped the handle with the other hand too, exhaled and rammed it with a jolt into my own stomach. While Airas stared at me, first flabbergasted, then with a mixture of concern and curiosity, a cry rang out in my ears. I glanced over to the barn door, where my little sister stood and screamed. Horror was written all over her face. My mother hurried over and turned as white as a ghost at the sight of me.
“Mama,” I whispered, before sinking into her arms.
Mama. Cassie. The present pulls me out of my memories, and grief tightens around my throat again. Sighing softly, I open my eyes and look out through the raindrop coated windshield at the overcast sky. What if death doesn't extinguish our existence and there is such thing as life after death? Hope of reunion with those we love? If it really is so, it would support my theory that I have a never-ending sentence to serve. Since in that case, I'll never see the two of them again because of my damned immortality.
***
Our penthouse apartment by the Alster River looks very elegant even from the outside. It's a fusion of classical Hamburg urban villa elements and the simple lines and large glass panes of modern apartment buildings. We bought it only six years ago, because we were sick of constantly staying in hotels, and it cost us a small fortune. But we tend to spend money just as quickly as we 'earn' it anyway. It's too easy for us to get hold of it. Really it's a shame we spend so little time here, and I'm afraid it will be even less since Cassie's death.
The remote control shutters that are installed on all windows, to offer privacy and protection from the sun, are always half-way down, whether we're there or not. It's no different in our villa in San Francisco. Each time before we fly to Hamburg, Wilson makes sure the apartment is thoroughly cleaned, just as he reliably makes sure of so many things. What did we ever do before we had Wilson?
Sixteen years ago Airas had a car accident one evening on the coastal road from Los Angeles to San Francisco. He hadn't attacked anyone since the thirties, but that night he set upon the man who had come to his aid. Airas just managed to stop in time. As he waited for Wilson Brody to come to again, so he could erase the incident from his memory through thought manipulation, he was very surprised at his first reaction at seeing him. Instead of feeling fear and horror, Wilson Brody still seemed to be concerned about my brother. Since that day an invisible bond has joined the two of them and we have a loyal companion by our sides. Airas thinks his blood must have gotten into Wilson's circulation when Airas pressed his blood-smeared hand to his mouth as he drank from him, and some kind of connection arose between them. As if part of him had permanently rooted itself in Wilson. To this day we haven't come up with another explanation for the Wilson phenomenon, but meanwhile we don't think about it anymore either. Testing it out on other people was never an option for us.
Heavy rain beats against the glass façade of the penthouse. I sink into the white sofa and stare out the window as Airas talks on the phone in the background.
I watch feebly as raindrops run down the window pane like tears over a face. I, on the other hand, feel like I'm going to choke on my unshed tears.
6
Amkaya
The change since Cassie's death is all-encompassing and makes itself felt in so many things. Even returning to the villa in San Francisco feels different. Every step in the upper right wing, which constitutes my realm, seems to be one step more separating me from Cassie. Just as each passing minute, each hour, each day tries to push between me and my sister like a sheet of cellophane. When will the memories become opaque, and when will she be so distant I have difficulty remembering her voice or her joyful laughter?
With time, my parents' voices became vague echoes. More than a century lies over the memories, which may in large part be readily available to me, but have also become brittle and faded in places.
Will it be the same with Cassie's voice?
From the outside, everything looks like it always did. My large bedroom, the walk-in closet, the luxurious bathroom with Italian marble tiles, the spiral staircase leading from my bedroom up into my studio. And yet it's no longer the same. I'm no longer the same.
While Airas seeks comfort in Phil's arms, I paint compulsively in my studio. The paintings show Cassie, my parents and my memories of our old home in the south of Spain. But they also show the darkness I'd so love to excise from myself. Past, present and future join under my brushstrokes making a potpourri of emotions. While I paint, I often listen through headphones to the music of David Garret or Lindsey Stirling, whose violin playing acts like an amplifier for my feelings. It wrenches and tugs on me, as if I'm struggling with all my might to bring forth something from within me which I can't manage to grasp. Something that tortures me unspeakably. Forgetting everything around me, I paint till exhaustion, but the feeling I've not rid myself of any of my burden remains. I capture my paintings on film with a Polaroid camera, and paste them into my scrapbook.
Like in a flipbook the days flick by me, meaningless and gray, and yet time stands still in this eternity. Most days I experience the world around me like a film, one I'm not playing any part in, rather just watching from the outside.
But today it's different. As soon as I open my eyes this morning, I feel its presence and I crawl back into the pillows on my bed. The beast is hungry. It sharpens my senses many times over and pulls on me, like a puppeteer on his marionette. The dripping faucet in the bathroom is so loud and irritating that I press my pillow over my ears. I try to ignore it but I can't. Another indication that it and its hunger are getting stronger. Finally I give up, jump out of bed and go to the hand basin to put an end to my suffering. But no matter how hard I twist and turn the faucet, it keeps dripping away undeterred.
“Goddamn it!” I swear aloud and stamp my foot like a child throwing a tantrum. I must tell Wilson so he can do something about it. My gaze is restless and catches on my reflection in the mirror. It's not the first time I've looked like a stranger to myself. The eyes under the long, wildly disheveled hair stare at me searchingly. I look weak and pale. Nevertheless, my eyes shine, vital and alert. I recognize the craving in them. Who could imagine the green harbored such deep darkness?
I always get these dark circles under my eyes when I can no longer suppress and ignore the other hunger, when it gets stronger and stronger inside me and I become weaker in my resistance, until I can barely manage to fight it anymore. Usually this loss of control happens gradually over days and weeks, but sometimes it happens in a matter of hours or overnight. Like this time.
Even before I'm aware of the rage within me, it comes shooting out like a geyser and with a single movement I swipe to the floor all the cosmetics and bottles laid out to my right on the generous natural stone counter by the hand basin.
“Dios mio, Senora Álvarez, are you alright? What happened? Oh, oh, oh, this will bring bad luck.”
Nita, the maid, stands in the doorway, holding her hand over her mouth in fright as her eyes widen with horror, taking in the chaotic scene.
She immediately starts picking up the larger shards with her bare hands.
“No, leave it, please,” I try to stop her. But smiling, she ignores my protests and chatters on incessantly. That's something she always does when she runs into me while she's cleaning. She talks up a storm and normally I even kind of like it. Today though, her words boom in my ears at first, only to fade away into a trivial background music like you hear in elevators. A melody which may be there, but you barely even notice anymore.
How pretty she looks with her big, dark eyes and the shoulder length, curly hair. Even though she's a good three stone overweight and wears a bit too much make-up for my taste, she's still enchanting, and I like her and her world view. I really like her. All her disappointments so far and the trouble she's lived through apparently haven't taken away her belief in the good in the world.
When she's making the bed or cleaning up and I'm around, she often tells me, without any inhibition, how she sees life. For some inexplicable reason I like listening to her optimistic and occasionally also infantile speeches. When she speaks, sometimes it seems like she has a glow that comes from inside. Then she looks like one of those delightful figurines in a snow globe, into whose ideal little world you can gaze, smiling, knowing full well how brutal reality looks, far from this little microcosm of wishes and dreams.
The seductive scent of her blood forces its way into my awareness in the same second as a shard of glass scratches a tiny cut into her finger. She becomes a flickering blur before my eyes, colors running into one another like a kaleidoscope in which I risk losing myself. No, this can't happen. I have to stay conscious. I can't allow it to kill Nita. Not Nita.
Why does she have to be here now of all times?
By blinking and repeatedly squeezing my eyes shut, I desperately fight the pull in me. Frantically, I tuck my hands into my folded forearms, as if I could hold on to myself and prevent what a part of me is about to do.
“Get out. Go. I want you out of here. Right now.” I hear myself scream, as the pain within proves me a liar and the tips of my fangs already bore into my lower lip.
“Come now, Nita,” Airas's stern voice reaches my ears. “Wilson will take care of that. Look at me. Don't worry about it, forget the whole incident. Take the day off today and have a rest.”
The two of them move away, out of my field of vision, and I'm caught between the feeling of relief and that of regret. Because I'm nauseous, I crawl over to the toilet and hold my head over the bowl, retching, but nothing but bile comes out.
“It's time, Kaya. You can't put it off any longer.” Airas is back and helps me up. “Let's do it in a controlled manner again, not leave it up to chance. You know it's going to happen, but it shouldn't be Nita or one of the other staff. That would make it harder for all of us.”
He doesn't say a word about Stella, but I know he's thinking of her right now and of what happened in this house six years ago. It's also a memory I try in vain to suppress; it haunts me time and again, and reminds me to keep my distance, especially from people I like. Wilson is inexplicably the only person, apart from my siblings, to whom I'm apparently no danger. To this day I haven't been able to figure out why, but I suspect it could be that through Airas's blood he carries a kind of protection in him, because no matter how ravenous the animal in me gets, Cassie and Airas were, like Wilson later too, never an option. Like two identical magnetic poles, just the smell of their blood was more repulsive than anything to the beast in me.
“Come on, little one, I'll pick the right one out for you. Trust me.”
***
We drive through Tenderloin, past the homeless people, drug addicts and alcoholics who make this neighborhood quite uninviting to the general population, especially after nightfall.
It was my brother's idea that, if I had to kill someone, I should choose one of the scum underway on the streets of the city. Individuals who, according to Airas, present an even greater risk to other people than I do. Drug dealers, pimps and human traffickers.
I sit tensely on the back seat of the old Buick that Airas bought just for these operations, so we wouldn't be so conspicuous when driving around in the seedy parts of town. The hunger tears at me and makes me tremble in pain. We drive in silence past bars and clubs, until Wilson parks in the back yard of a dilapidated pay-by-the-hour hotel. Airas turns back to me from the passenger seat, gives me an encouraging nod and gets out of the car. As he disappears out of sight, I press my hands together nervously and cast a glance at Wilson, who looks away discretely. He knows how embarrassing my condition is to me.
When my brother is back and opens the door for me, I step out hesitantly and follow him into the shabby room he rented on the ground floor.
“Back in a minute,” he says and leaves me alone in the room, where I won't be staying the night and whose light brown carpet sports so many stains you'd think quite a few people had already lost their lives here. Stains that disgust me and engage my flight instinct. The nasty smell, yellowed walls and the cross over the bed, from which the wooden Jesus looks at me reproachfully, make it difficult for me to stay too. But I don't leave the room, because another part of me doesn't care. That part thirsts for blood, and for life. Its own life, and that of another, which it's prepared to snuff out to keep its own.
I sweat and pace back and forth in the small room. I'm having trouble concentrating and in addition to the pain, I feel muscle spasms throughout my body. My skin is hypersensitive and even the fabric of my dress feels so uncomfortable, I wish I could get rid of it.
Footsteps outside the door announce the arrival of Airas and another person. I hear the key opening the lock, and I go to the window to look out at the darkness of the back yard through a gap in the curtains. A cat leaps down from a windowsill and chases after another. I want to go, don't want to be here, anywhere, just not here. My brother and his companion enter the room and the smell of the stranger immediately hits my nose. Tangy-sweet and slightly musty from the joint he must have just smoked.
“Ahhh, there she is,” comes his voice.
I turn to them and try hard not to look at his face, out of fear it will haunt me in my nightmares. I feel the upturned corners of my mouth, but don't feel the smile.
“Hey, man, you were damn right, she's hot,” he says to Airas and I lower my gaze to his shoes.
“I'll wait outside,” says Airas and leaves the room.
“You haven't been doing this long, huh girl? No need to be shy. Old Jim'll give it to you good.”
The brown shoes come closer and stop just in front of me. Right next to one of the ugly stains on the carpet. I can hear the blood whooshing loudly through his veins. An inviting sound for the animal in me, which stirs hungrily and clouds my awareness. It wants me to let go and give up the last of my resistance, but I still hold tight to the imaginary spot on his shoe.
“Come on, don't be like that,” says Jim. He reaches his arm around my body, grabs my behind and pulls me to him.
“Now look at me,” he complains and presses his groin against me. Through blurry eyes I see the horror in his face as I lift mine. As the animal in me seizes him and rips open his throat, I
look on with indifference. Blood moistens my face and the animal sinks my teeth into his neck before it begins to drink, and finally my consciousness gives in. It turns away from the bloodbath my body is making and remembers the view of the dark back yard. It remains there until Airas's voice breaks through to me.
“Kaya? Do you hear me?” He shakes me gently. I meet his gaze apathetically.
“Come on, little one. We've got to get out of here.” He gives me several quick, light slaps on the cheek. Only now do I come back to myself.
I quickly look around the room, but there is only us – me and Airas. He and Wilson must have already gotten rid of Jim and cleaned up all traces. There aren't many new stains on the carpet, but I see them immediately. Airas helps me into the jacket he brought with him and we leave the hotel. We only stop for a moment at reception, where Airas uses mind control to impress upon the man that he never saw us.