Blood Ties

by Gina Whitney

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What the fuck? Sheep’s blood. Really?”

  James said, “Catherine has been feeding on live humans, which makes her infinitely stronger than you are. In fact she’s stronger than all of us put together. The sheep’s blood has worked to sustain you for the past few months. Now its potency is dwindling. It’s now only effective for a couple of hours. In the next stages of your evolution, you must feed on something else.”

  He stepped away from me and walked around the room. He held his chin as he thought of the gentlest way to tell me the rest. “The first time we all saw you at the table a few months ago, eating all the bacon and sausage…you were ravenous.”

  “Stop beating around the bush, James,” I said, though I didn’t really want to hear the rest.

  “Our first objective was just to keep you alive during your Awakening.”

  “And the second?”

  “To satisfy your indwelling Ancient spirit so you’ll be able to battle Catherine. We have to feed you.”

  “James, what will I be eating?”

  “Tonight. You’ll see tonight.”

  Addison was my designated babysitter for the evening. Her only task was to keep me out of the house for a couple of hours. I hardly spoke to her, still peeved that she’d known what was in that drink and had been keeping it secret from me.

  We were on our way back from a very, very long walk on the desolate road leading to Aunt Evelyn’s house. The nearest neighbor was miles away. Thanks to Hari’s drills, the hike was no problem at all. Even though we had lanterns, our path was mostly lit by the waning gibbous moon. I looked into the trees and saw the glowing eyes of woodland creatures dotting the darkness like Christmas lights. I wasn’t too concerned about the animals, but I sure was glad to see the driveway of Aunt Evelyn’s house.

  “Why did you drag me around all day? It seems pointless,” I said as I swatted mosquitoes.

  “They had to get ready.” Addison pursed her lips; she was nervous as hell. “You’ll see soon enough.”

  Aunt Evelyn’s house was swallowed up by absolute darkness. Thank goodness for the electric candles blazing in the windows. But it still looked like a haunted house; the only things missing were the carved-out pumpkins.

  Hari, who had been sitting in the parlor, hurried to meet us in the foyer.

  “It’s time,” Addison told him.

  He nodded, and with no words went back to the parlor and put on his headphones. He cranked AC/DC up as loud as he could, as if making an attempt to drown something out.

  Aunt Evelyn emerged from the basement with Adrian, both looking like executioners from the Inquisition. They were so serious with their sullen faces. Maybe the black druid robes they wore made them feel gloomy.

  James was nowhere in sight. I hadn’t seen him since earlier that day.

  Adrian handed me a robe. “Put it on,” he said. Addison put hers on so fast I didn’t see how she’d done it. I struggled with mine. Step into it? Pull it over my head? Adrian came over and gave me a reassuring wink. He opened it up and slid it right on me.

  Aunt Evelyn had two tall candles in her hand, and she gave me one. I was about to speak, but she held her finger to her lips and shushed me.

  We all made our way up the stairs in what felt like a funeral procession. Aunt Evelyn was in front of me, and Addison and Adrian took up the rear. I’d had no idea the steps made so much noise, but I guess in deathly silence you pick up on such things.

  We arrived on the second floor and passed Julie’s room. She stood there like she was watching a sinister parade. I made eye contact with her, in a way asking for help in all that weirdness. She simply closed her door.

  The rest of us made our way to the mysterious door. Aunt Evelyn pulled out a skeleton key to open it. The smell of old incense wafted out. We stepped into a tight area at the bottom of a narrow staircase. As we proceeded to climb the steps, I stepped on something. I could hear the sound of collapsing metal under my foot, and bent down to retrieve the item. It was a tiny bell. That was the origin of the clanging I’d heard the other day. It had been a primitive alarm system to signal the presence of an incoming intruder.

  It was extremely dark in the stairwell. I ran my hands against the wall for guidance, since my eyes hadn’t adjusted. However, as we got closer to the top, a source of light lit our way.

  I thought I heard the low moaning of an animal. It sounded like had been caught in a trap.

  We reached the candlelit upper room—a marvel of ingenious architecture. Anyone standing outside would have been led to believe the secret, windowless room was an extension of the attic. On the far side, a black curtain hung from the ceiling. A red pentagram was carved into the floor, and next to it were butcher’s knives and a machete.

  I heard that moaning again. It sounded like it was coming from behind the curtain.

  Aunt Evelyn spoke softly, as if we were in a church. “We are all possessed by the Ancients we summoned and invoked for revenge. Therefore, these spirits are all evil. We have been living on borrowed time by not feeding them what they demand. That was Ilan’s wish—for us to abstain. But the time of reckoning has come. We do not eat for pleasure but for sustenance…survival…power to fight. That is why we feed. We only do it under ritualistic conditions. Unlike Catherine.”

  The moaning grew louder. No one else seemed even to be paying attention to it.

  Aunt Evelyn went on. “Catherine is possessed by a particularly sadistic Ancient that has made her psychotic. She has bonded with its evil so much, she does not even need ritual to invoke it anymore. It is operating within her at all times. She’s not just a cannibal—she’s the Jeffrey Dahmer of witches. She has a real taste for human flesh. With every kill she gains the life force of her meat for her malevolent Ancient to use. Even though we appear strong, we are at a tremendous disadvantage because we haven’t been feeding properly. To fight her we have to appeal to and strengthen our own Ancients.”

  “Aunt Evelyn, you’re starting to scare me. What are you really saying?” I asked.

  James came from behind the curtain with a pathetic little man, the source of the moaning. The man was covered in bruises. His hands were tied behind his back, and he was blindfolded.

  “Please, dear God, whoever you are. Please don’t hurt me,” the man said.

  James removed his blindfold. His eyes were blood red from subconjunctival hemorrhaging. He looked at me directly. I had never seen an expression of terror like that in my life. “Please help me,” the little man begged of me.

  “Don’t feel sorry for him. He’s a bad man. I captured him as he was in the process of luring a five-year-old boy off a playground,” James said as he threw the man to the ground.

  “I wasn’t going to harm him. I just wanted to be his friend,” the man lied.

  Aunt Evelyn looked at me. “Because of your heritage, you too have an Ancient spirit residing in you. It’s now time you understand what that means.”

  James and Adrian all of a sudden started kicking and battering the man. This had to be the only time those two had ever cooperated with each other. The man rolled up into a ball in a feeble attempt to protect himself. James and Adrian stretched him back out, lifted him up, and dropped him on the pentagram. Addison staked his feet and hands to the its corners. The pedophile looked like the Vitruvian Man. The room took on an eerie glow as Aunt Evelyn chanted a spell from an ancient book in some language I’d never heard.

  James kissed me. “This is going to be difficult to watch. When it’s over, just remember I did it for the love of you.”

  Aunt Evelyn looked like a judge as she took her post at the little man’s head. The others took the knives and started chanting with her. Then they stabbed the man repeatedly. The little man didn’t make any noise at first. I figured he was in shock. Then the unrelenting pain crested in his body, and he wailed the most awful cry. I covered my ears; I could not bear his ungodly screams.

  The witches started to shake viol
ently and convulse as their fantastically long fangs emerged. Their joints unhinged as if they were double-jointed. The witches’ faces, though retaining their original features, took on gargoyle-like ghoulishness. Aunt Evelyn looked down at the man with her hellion eyes and chopped off his head with the machete. Chunks of flesh and puddles of blood surrounded the carcass. The only thing left of his body was a mushy pulp. The witches then devoured the flesh like crazed animals. They were frenzied, overcome with bloodlust. As they ate I saw the little man’s soul enter each of them.

  Horrifically, I felt my own hunger rising, and I wanted to eat too. I had to get out of there. I scooted backward to the stairs, watching the others ingest every piece of that man. My foot slipped off the top step, and I tumbled to the bottom of the stairs. Thankfully I had a hard head, because I landed square on it. A bit dazed, I crawled out into the hallway.

  James ran down the steps with his whole face and body covered in blood. At first I thought he was coming to get me and make me dessert. But he reached out to me with a hand dripping blood.

  I backed into the wall. “Don’t come near me,” I said, making a cross with my fingers.

  “I’m not a vampire,” James said. He approached me ever so slowly, like he was about to capture a frightened kitten. “I didn’t want you to find out like this. But there was no way to ease into it.” He kneeled beside me, his eyes still glowing from the arousal of his feeding free-for-all.

  Of course I knew the history of the Ancients. But since the beginning of this journey, I’d been able to conveniently keep certain realities out of my mind. When the subject of feeding came up, I discounted it as something other witches did centuries ago. However, the past was now the present, and I had to admit what kind of monster James was. And what kind of monster I would be.

  Girdled by all this carnage, I had an epiphany. In my frantic desire to be normal again, I finally understood that, since the day I was born, this had always been my normal. I just hadn’t been aware of it until now.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I prefer to characterize rape simply as a form of torture. Like the torturer, the rapist is motivated by the urge to dominate, humiliate, and destroy his victim. Like a torturer, he does so by using the most intimate acts available to humans—sexual ones.

  —Helen Benedict

  Lingering dregs of the little man’s soul still clung to the house, phasing in and out like multicolored motion blurs. They tried to hang on to their last bit of earthly existence by attempting to merge into the electrical system. This forced the house’s light sources to seesaw between burning overly bright and dwindling to the barest illumination.

  It was only a few minutes after the sacrifice, and my shell shock was just beginning to manifest. My legs trembled underneath me as I haplessly tried to process what had just occurred. James propped me up and escorted me to my room. As we slowly moved down the dark hallway, my mind began to splinter in an attempt to erase the traumatic carnage I had just witnessed. The world became one gigantic carnival mirror, distorting into harsh, jarring images. I reached out into the empty space before me to get my bearings as the hall stretched upward and suddenly snapped back into place.

  James was talking to me, but there was some sort of time delay between his lips moving and the sounds of the words hitting my ears. From what I could make out, he was repeating my name and asking if I was okay. I loved that man, but that was a seriously dumb question. After about a thousand “are you okays,” he led me into my room and parked me in the middle of the braided rug.

  “Stay there,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as we’re done.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, spaced all out of my mind.

  James jetted out, and I was left alone, catatonic, staring at the door. Through the wee portion of lucidity I had left, I made out the fast and pounding thuds of his feet as he raced back up the attic stairs. A few moments later, I heard the mumbling of faraway voices counseling each other about waste management.

  They made a decision, which resulted in a macabre symphony coming from the portion of the attic above my head. The opening sonata was the long drags of body parts to different areas of floor. That was followed by the cringe-inducing adagio of hacksaws cutting straight through bones, and their jagged teeth embedding into the wooden floorboards. Next up was the scherzo. This was composed of the thwop-ing of trash bags being shaken open and the accompanying blunt thuds of body parts being dropped in. The last movement, the allegro, couldn’t come fast enough. The musical selection ended with the dull thumps of mops dunking into plastic buckets and the swooshing of water across the floor.

  The deceptively calm splashing somehow awakened me from my transfixed state. I looked down at my arms and saw flecks of dried blood all over them. Its strong ferric odor excited my appetite once again. I staved it off the best I could, and became actively engaged in a tug-of-war between instinct and will. My arm made its way to my hungry lips; my tongue came out for a taste of the blood. But I refused to indulge this animalistic desire.

  Was this what it was going to be like? Constantly craving other people’s blood? There had to be another way for me to avoid feeding. Hell, I’d drink that damn sheep’s blood for the rest of my life if I had to.

  Still, that blood smelled so good.

  I had to get it off me right away. I promptly propped a chair under the doorknob. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust the other witches; I just couldn’t take any more surprises. I went to the bathroom and flipped the light switch.

  The overhead bulb exploded due to the still-pulsating, residual energy of Aunt Evelyn’s spell and the little man’s rapidly deteriorating noumenon traveling through the wires. Luckily for me the dull light over the medicine cabinet still worked. I looked up, still hearing the other witches cleaning— that dreadful noise. I turned on shower, hoping the water would drown it out.

  I started to remove my clothing and realized I was covered in more blood than I’d thought. In fact my clothes were stuck to me. I practically had to peel my shirt off my skin due to the massive amount of dried blood. I shucked off my pants and undergarments too, and stood there looking like a mottled piece of peppermint candy.

  My stomach churned at the sight of death covering me. Even though the little man was scum, he was a human being— a person who had died because of me. I might as well have eaten him myself. I prayed a shower would wash away the squishy blob of guilt encapsulating me. I stepped in, and the glow of my flickering eyes reflected on the tiles. I turned my head. I so hated seeing myself that way.

  The water heated up quickly, but it wasn’t scorching enough for me. I desired self-punishment, some atonement for what had happened to the dead man. I turned the knob to its hottest setting—basically scalding. Like lava the water rolled off my hair and down my body. However, the dried, crusted blood would not let go of me that easily. It stayed plastered on like superglue. I grabbed a leftover sliver of soap and swabbed my skin with hard strokes. The scant amount of foamy bubbles failed to liquefy the blood.

  Frustrated, I sank to the floor and wept bloody tears. The water finally loosened the tiny, solid pieces of the man’s blood, allowing the flecks and my sanguine teardrops to intermix and swirl down the drain.

  I don’t know how long I huddled in that shower, but it must’ve been a long time. My soles and palms had wrinkled into plump, red raisins, while the rest of my skin was ruddy from the constant hammering of the super-heated water. I contemplated staying in the safe confines of the cave-like sauna for eternity…until I heard a ruckus coming from the bedroom. I scrambled up to turn off the water and listen more closely.

  The bedroom door’s knob rattled and shook, then the propped-up chair hit the floor. I popped out of the shower like a spring had boinged under me. There was no way I was going to get caught unaware—basically ass out.

  I grabbed my bleach-splotched pink robe off a hook and steeled myself. Cringing, little by little I opened the door. I didn’t see anyone in the room, but when the fuck
did that ever mean anything? Like a fencer I lunged out, totally forgetting the en garde.

  Without warning the attic fan kicked on, causing the bathroom door to slam shut behind me. I looked back and saw James standing there. He was freshly showered and hadn’t dried off all the way; his thin shirt was slightly sticky on his skin. I didn’t appreciate his sneaking around; quite frankly it scared me a little. However, the night’s events did not diminish the strangely charged bond between us. We were still hopelessly attached by a tight and tense invisible wire that was always pulling us closer together.

  “What are you now? A fucking creeper?” I said. “You should’ve given a heads-up that you were going to get all cannibal on me.”

  James drew closer to me, but I kept my distance.

  “Grace, I have a confession,” he said. “We used you. Your fear actually amped up the spell. We regret doing that, but some actions are necessary.”

  I know I should’ve been angry as hell, but his sparklingblue eyes penetrated me. Whatever misgivings I had melted away. Maybe it was my desperate need for comfort, but I felt myself succumbing to him.

  “James, I saw you kill and eat a man. I’ll never be able to erase that from my mind. Things are too heavy for me right now…just moving too fast. Just when I accept the situation, something more bizarre happens and throws everything off kilter again. I want to be light and content. I want to be happy. Can you make me happy again, even if it’s just for a little while? Even if the happiness isn’t real? Please.”

  I needed to disappear into James, and fell into his arms in an attempt to become one with him. We both knew there was only one way for us to merge body and soul.

  He rocked me while kissing the top of my head. “Alright, baby, alright.”

  My body relaxed into safety again as he lifted my face and kissed me deeper, with his own sense of desperation. Normally this would have been the point where he’d back off—before things got too heated. But now he swooped me up like a bride on our wedding night and carried me to the bed. With unbroken eye contact, he gently laid me down. He untied my robe and slipped it off. He let out a satisfied gasp.