by Atha, DL
“So you knew you were going to die?”
“Yeah, he made that pretty clear.”
“So what happened to the agreement? Why are you still alive?”
“Are you serious?” I asked. “I’m alive because I outsmarted him. He was going to kill me.”
“Yes, Annalice. He was. He made that perfectly clear, and you agreed to his terms.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Yeah, he promised me certain death for the life of my family or just my death. So my choice was death or death. The deal wasn’t fair.”
“Of course, the deal wasn’t fair. He was a vampire, but you accepted what was offered. A deal doesn’t have to be fair to be accepted.”
“I gave my word to cooperate with him, and I did. I did everything he said to do. I answered every question he asked of me. I offered up my body and my blood at his every command. I agreed to cooperate for the full week, and I did. I never agreed to not fight at the end. I never agreed that I wouldn’t try to kill him in the last moments.”
“And how did you manage to ram a stake through his heart exactly? You were a weak, dying human. Was he in his day sleep?” Levi’s voice had gotten deadlier with each passing word.
I spoke quickly, fearing hesitation would bring his immediate wrath. “I couldn’t go out into the sun, Levi. My skin was on fire. I faced him as almost a full‐fledged vampire.” “So he was changing you?”
“Not intentionally.”
“And you didn’t tell him?”
“Of course not. And why should I? That was my only edge. Asa was alone and bitter all the way up to the moment I rammed that stake into his heart. Otherwise, he would have known I was changing right in front of his eyes.”
This wasn’t going well. Levi’s expression had gone from an open book to a locked diary with a missing key. “And how did you know to stake him?” he asked.
I laughed out loud. “Are you fricking kidding me? Have you not seen any vampire movies? Everyone knows to kill a vampire you have to stake him. Besides, he told me all the ways to kill him.”
The atmosphere changed in the room, and even the soft glow of the candles couldn’t infuse any warmth into his expression. “Only one reason exists to reveal your Achilles heel to another, and that is because you trust them. He trusted you, and you betrayed him.” The candle wavered in the wind as Levi rose up from the floor.
“I never betrayed him. He didn’t trust anyone. You can’t betray someone who doesn’t trust you,” I said, knowing my words were doing no good. I stayed put on the dirt floor, not wanting to incense him further.
“You’re going to burn in the sun. You will pay for what you did to him.”
I was terrified. The kind of terrified that makes you move like molasses. A long entrenched response that your body adopts when the time is not quite right for fight or flight. I inched my legs out from under me and slowly lifted myself to a sprinting position. “I didn’t do anything wrong!” I insisted again.
“You were supposed to be his companion, and you betrayed him. That is the only explanation for his revealing our secrets to you. I don’t believe you could have bested him in a fair fight. He trusted you, and you betrayed him.”
My fingernails dug into the dirt. Levi stalked a circle around me like a mercenary. I spun slowly on the balls of my feet keeping him in front of me. When my back was to the stairwell, I stood up quickly. He spun towards the sudden movement and stopped. “And I would have been his companion if he’d let me live. I was planning to leave with him if he turned me. He offered me a second deal a few days later. If I agreed to spend the night with him as a true vampire, he’d answer my every question except where his daytime sleeping spot was. I never knew that little tidbit until he was dead. I went with him that last night, and he killed a human in the woods. He made me watch, and when it was over, despite my having done everything he requested, he told me he was going to kill me anyhow, and that he wasn’t going to turn me. I didn’t stake him when he wasn’t looking, Levi. I fought him in a fair fight, and I won. He was simply too blind to see that I’d changed.”
Levi watched me blandly, his mind already made up. “You never raise a hand against your maker,” he answered.
When he reached for me, I was gone. I heard the last of his answer as I exploded out the top of the staircase and through the front door of the sagging cabin. I was partially fed and faster than I remembered. The forest should have been a blur as I sped through it, but amazingly, my view was crystal clear as I raced away from camp and back towards town. What also had amazing clarity was the sound of the rock Levi threw whistling through the air. I looked over my shoulder just before it barreled into my back and cracked my spinal canal wide open. My legs went out from under me with no precision whatsoever, and I fell face first into the grunge of the forest floor, my face skidding ungracefully across it.
Everyone admires Anne Boleyn for facing her beheading so calmly, and I’d like to say I looked that brave, serenely waiting for the end. In reality, I was spitting dirt out of my mouth, my tongue lacerated and bleeding, desperately clawing the dirt, and dragging myself on bloodied elbows across the ground as Levi walked towards me. There wasn’t a hint of pity on his face.
“I sentence you to death. You will be hanged in the first light,”
Levi said, flipping me over. He was silent as he grabbed hold of my ankles and dragged me back to camp. I was cussing like the proverbial sailor.
Chapter 20
I’d quit screaming by the time he dumped me in the middle of camp. My head was on fire from bumping on the rocks, as was the part of my spine that was still intact. Below that I was numb and motionless, my legs dead weight.
“You could at least have the decency to quit grubbing in the dirt and face your sentence like a vampire,” Levi said as he began to strip my jeans down my legs. I was clawing at his hands and trying to rip his hair out.
“Like a vampire? As far as I can tell, there’s nothing at all honorable about any of you. And you want me to face death bravely? Screw you!”
He jerked my boots off, one after another, followed by one of my socks. My toes were starting to burn. Already I was healing. “I am a very honorable man.”
“You’re not a man. You’re a vampire, and a piece of shit at that.” I gripped my sweater with both hands, but he jerked it roughly, and I lost my grip. My bra followed.
Leaning over me, Levi gripped my chin so harshly my mandibular joints ground together in my ears. “So says the girl, the vampire, who killed her own maker. Don’t talk to me about honor. You don’t know the first thing about it.”
“And you think Asa did? You know he never mentioned you. Know why? Because he didn’t give a shit about you or your precious maker. You wanna know what he said about him?”
He didn’t want to know; I could tell as he looked away. But finally, he looked back because he couldn’t stand the not knowing.
“Asa said he hoped your maker was in hell. He hoped he was burning.” I was smiling when I said it. I wanted the words to hurt. I wanted him to hurt.
He looked away again into the distance of the forest, his strong hand holding my ankles. The light Arkansas breeze lifted his hair, and I could smell his anger. “But Asa didn’t put him there, did he?” Levi finally answered. His voice was calm, too precise. “But you did. And that’s why you’re going to burn,” he said, pulling off the other sock.
I searched desperately for a response but couldn’t come up with one, so I resumed my fighting and managed to get one blow in to the side of his head. He cursed under his breath and got to his feet. I couldn’t have hurt him that badly, I thought to myself as he walked a few feet away. The rattle of chains told me I’d been right. Levi wasn’t hurt.
I’d tried to hold on to some semblance of calm, but when he came back carrying two chains with links as big as his thumbs, I completely lost it. I hit him with doubled fists, slapped, spit and bucked as much as my broken back would allow. He didn’t retaliate at all, e
xcept to pin my flailing arms with his knees and avoid my blows as best he could, until I managed to get my teeth into his thigh. His blood spurted into my mouth, and I sucked it down in mouthfuls until he managed to jerk his body away from mine. By that time, I was shackled, and he jerked the two chains, each connected to a limb at both ends, and doubled me up into the letter c.
“My blood is sacred,” he hissed. “And you are undeserving.” “Little high on yourself, aren’t you?” I answered back, but my struggling had stopped. Putting up a good fight is hard to do when the back of your head is nearly touching your feet.
He dragged me to a large oak tree in the center of camp. Old enough to have been here when the camp was in use, the tree towered over the remains of the small barracks. Two or three of the branches would have been perfect for tire swings. The highest one must have also been perfect for hangings, and it was to this one that Levi dragged me, still bent in half.
I cried out when he cinched my arms up above my head and laced the chains over the tree branch. He re‐connected them to the chains on my legs. All the weight was on my arms, and if I’d been human, the force would have dislocated my shoulders. As it was, the pressure just hurt like hell.
“So what about your witnesses?” I asked through gritted teeth.
“Decided I didn’t want to wait. I’m witness enough. But no worries. Everyone will hear your screams two counties over.”
“I hope I disappoint you,” I said, my teeth grinding harshly. One of my back molars splintered with the pressure.
Behind me, he cinched the chains tighter. My hips grated in pain, and I sucked the air in harshly. “I really doubt you’ll disappoint me in that regard. Pain tolerance doesn’t seem to be one of your strengths. Besides, you’ve already disappointed me enough for several lifetimes.”
Grabbing hold of my feet, he twisted my lower body so that the chains crossed each other in an x pattern. My right shoulder couldn’t take the pressure any longer and dislocated. I bit my tongue to keep from screaming. Blood ran through my teeth and down my lips. I swallowed it down as best I could.
“What was that?” Levi asked. “Did you try to say something?”
He let go of my legs and my body swung around again, jarring the dislocated joint. Blood ran from my eyes. He was right. I’d put on quite a show at first light.
He walked in a half circle to face me, one finger tracing the contours of my waist and the swell of my hipbones. “Such a shame that you must be put to death,” he said, placing the flat of his palm over my lower belly. “We could have had lifetimes to enjoy each other.” The fine hairs on my lower abdomen rose against his breath while he stroked one of my inner thighs.
“Don’t you mean Asa and I could have had lifetimes together?” I lifted my upper body to see him better. And there his logic faltered. I saw the realization on his face when he recognized his own mental non‐sequitur. “Because if I hadn’t staked Asa, I’d still be with him, right?”
Levi said nothing, just swallowed a little harder than he needed to.
“Be careful or you’ll choke on your pride,” I said. He pushed me away from him, and I swung painfully in the chains as I struggled to talk. “You know in your heart that Asa would have never made anyone. But you can’t accept the fact that he didn’t want me because then you’d have to accept that he didn’t want you either.”
It hit me then like a bolt of lightning. “And that’s what bothers you, isn’t it?”
I could see the indecisive tilt of his head as he considered looking at me. “You’re jealous because I spent more time with Asa than anyone else, including you. You keep wondering what he saw in this woman that made him even consider turning her. You wanted to be close to him, but he wouldn’t let you in. Was it a brother thing? Did you have a brother once and your maker killed him? Were you thinking Asa was going to take his place? You just can’t get past the idea that he considered choosing me over you. So now I burn for it!”
He ignored me completely, but I could hear him gritting his teeth. Obviously, I’d hit a nerve, but would it be enough to elicit the response I was looking for.
The next couple of hours slid by like ketchup from a glass bottle. I kept up a steady stream of insults, interrupted with as many logical reasons I could think of that I didn’t deserve what he was doing to me. And by the set of his shoulders, I could tell I was getting exactly nowhere. Jealousy is a tough façade to chip. The only reply to all my insults and testimony was “two hours until you won’t be so chatty.”
I kept going. “And exactly how do you have a maker that doesn’t realize he is making you? I wasn’t even fully formed when I staked him. I still had a heartbeat when Asa died because I hadn’t been made. As far as Asa was concerned, I was completely human. He had no idea he’d changed me. To make is a verb that requires intentional action. Like being a decent man. That also requires intentional action. Something inherently missing from male vampires it seems. Asa couldn’t take any more credit for me than Alexander Fleming and his forgotten Petri dish.”
But no matter what I said, Levi was committed to ignoring me and another hour passed in complete silence. He’d relocated a tombstone‐sized rock up against a tree, leaned back, and studied the sky as my remaining ball and socket joints dislocated. I’d screamed in pain as the tendons pulled apart, but it was actually a relief once the pressure was gone and I was able to get quiet and think about what was happening. There was nothing left to say. No new insults left to gouge him with. I had no more arguments that I could throw at him, and if he wanted me to beg, well, then he could go to hell. And speaking of that, I said a prayer for my daughter and mother and asked God to spare me passing from this fire to another.
I was deep in morose thoughts when Levi spoke. I was so convinced of my doom at first I thought I’d hallucinated. “Did you compare yourself to penicillin?” he asked.
I lifted my head up when he repeated the question. “What does it matter? You don’t have the good sense to understand my metaphor.” I gave the chains a hard jerk as if it put more power into my anger. The pain was searing. Not the best one of my ideas so far.
“I would expect you to be intelligent enough to know those chains are a circuit. Pressure exerted on any limb will exert an equal and opposite force on another. That’s Newton’s law. If you don’t understand that, I seriously doubt you’re going to revolutionize modern medicine in the way penicillin did,” he said.
But he was speaking again, and I took that as a good sign. I could feel his eyes on my back as the arguments I’d made bantered back and forth in his head against his own. Two lawyers both with good points. I knew it immediately when my council won out. He still had a few human vestiges, and the breath that he’d been holding blew out in relief. Maybe this had been harder on him than I thought.
Grasping my shoulders, he swung me around to face him. More hot bloody tears tracked down my cheeks from the pain. He pulled my face towards his, his stare determined and hard. I knew he wasn’t going to hang me in the sun now but that didn’t guarantee my survival. There had been two decisions to make.
To sentence me to burn, which he’d decided against, and whether he should put an end to Asa’s mistake. He could still kill me if for no other reason than to make the world a better place. I glared back, unflinching into his face while he decided if I was going to exist or not. The second decision appeared to be made when he narrowed his eyes, his gaze slipping downward to my mouth and then to my naked body. Being owned is not a good feeling. My breasts hardened in humiliation. I didn’t look away though. I couldn’t stand to appear weak.
He smiled at my bravery. “You would have made a good lawyer. A bit snarky, but you do have a valid point. I agree that he did not knowingly make you, the sacred relationship wasn’t there, and so you owed him nothing. But we remain with a problem. You are still alive, without a maker. Therefore, I assume the rights and duties of your creator. In my possession and through my blood, you will be made whole. You will never raise a ha
nd to me, and I will never desert you. I bear full responsibility for you now.”
Levi unhooked the chains that shackled my forearms to my ankles and my right shoulder slid back into place as he lowered me to the ground. I groaned in pain as I hit the dirt. My spine still hadn’t healed and my back was on fire. I was naked, dirty and utterly humiliated. Levi held out his arm as a peace offering.
“Screw you,” I said, turning my face away. “And I’d be whole if you hadn’t done this to me so you can shut up with the crazy talk.” The overdone poeticism was pissing me off.
“Refusing my blood won’t get back at me. You’re the only one who suffers.”
“Easy for you to say since you’re the one who did this to me,” I answered.
“Would it help if I apologized?” “What do you think?” I asked.
“Then I won’t. Asa was a vampire. He deserved a trial for his death.”
“Always thinking of Asa,” I said, ripping into his arm, his gasp of surprise and pain bringing me some measure of happiness.
Chapter 21
Within the hour, my spine had healed and I was standing on my own two feet. The clothes Levi had so graciously dropped on my belly were a relief to pull back on. He’d let me drink until I’d stopped on my own and then he’d slid down the length of a tree looking dejected. No longer starving, and my anger slightly appeased, I was willing to talk civilly again. “I don’t know why you care so much about Asa. He certainly didn’t care anything about you.”
“You don’t have to be cruel,” Levi answered. A stick of wood made its way into his hand and he scribbled in the dirt like any four‐year‐old wanting to avoid eye contact.
“Don’t I? You were about to burn me alive over a worthless waste of skin.”
He ignored my question, carving deeper into the earth. “He wasn’t worthless.”
I looked at him incredulously, my anger full blown again. “I don’t think you knew him very well, Levi. Maybe you’re not the best judge.”