Undeath: The Fragile Shadows Series (A Paranormal Vampire Romance)

by Lily Levi

  There was no way to tell how far she’d gone or how far she was likely to go.

  It didn’t matter.

  She walked and knew that was what she was supposed to do, if there was anything to do at all, and there wasn’t.

  But when she saw the thick black line on the horizon, like a giant, flattened worm, she stopped.

  A quiet hum reverberated out from the strange covering over the red flats and she wondered if she’d ever heard anything in the world before that.

  It was the first sound of all sounds.

  She moved forward.

  There was somewhere to go.

  The closer she drew, the louder the hum.

  Strange ripples formed on the top of the black worm, like pointed black hairs. They swayed with the hum.

  She might’ve turned back and gone – where? – but something, some magnetic pull of sound, drew her towards the black worm against the shortening horizon. She felt very much that it was where she was supposed to go and because of this, there was nowhere else to go.

  She watched the passing of the mud tiles beneath her and saw that there were no shadows and no light to make the shadows. It was not surprising. She knew that there had never been shadows in the world or light to make them. There had never been anything at all, not really.

  When she looked up, the black worm was what it always had been: a crowd of dark figures, impossibly tall and thin, swaying together, humming a song that seemed to rise and dip with no discernable melody.

  In their own way, they were people. There was no way to tell how she knew this, only that she knew it.

  She stood beside them.

  Those on the edge of the black mass looked at her, though they had no eyes from which to look. One by one, they turned away, and it was as if she’d never disturbed them.

  She was where she was supposed to be.

  Chapter Eight

  June 6, 1994

  Neverpine, California

  Hear me.

  Her heart thundered slowly. She’d dreamt that she was wandering through the middle of nowhere over cracked dirt. There had been a dead worm, shriveled from the baking heat.

  But she wasn’t there anymore.

  The air in the room was stifling and dark. Long drapes hung over the wooden bed posts above her body. The carved ceiling glimmered, even in the dark.

  Can you hear me?

  She struggled to sit, but her body refused to move. Her hands were like petrified claws beside her hips and her legs were like long, wooden poles. She could feel the weight of her own body on top of the bed, but nothing else, not even the fabric of the sheets against her fingertips.

  She tried to open her mouth, but it was sealed shut. Only her eyes were her own.

  “Can you hear me?”

  She rolled her eyes with a painstaking slowness to the side of the bed and stared at the man beside her. It was all she could do.

  Disheveled hair fell over his forehead. His shirt was rolled up to the elbows. She could feel how he strained to see her, even in the growing light.

  Her vision lightened slowly. The room wasn’t dark at all.

  She closed her eyes, exhausted with the effort of looking.

  A warm, wet cloth touched her mouth and startled her back into looking. She could feel the warmth against her lips and in feeling it, could also feel how they ached.

  He placed the cloth into a silver bowl beside her head. “Will you speak?” he asked. He moved just a leaned over the side of the bed to look into her face. His eyes shone with an odd excitement that made her feel strangely uncomfortable.

  She nodded, finding that she could move, if only a little. She wanted to speak, though she had no idea what she would say. There was nothing to draw from in her mind, only the room and the man beside her.

  He leaned in closer. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, startling herself with the foreign sound of her own voice.

  Her throat ached violently with the effort of speech. She swallowed against the pain.

  “Here.” He placed his hand behind her head and lifted her up from the pillows. With his free hand, he placed a crystal decanter against her mouth and pushed the cold lip of the vase against her teeth. “Water,” he said gently, allowing a slow stream to flow along the dry length of her tongue and down into her clogged throat.

  She choked on the sweet coolness of it.

  He lowered her head back down against the pillows and she stared up at him.

  She couldn’t remember his face and she knew that she should be able to. He had to be someone to her, but she couldn’t remember who.

  “Remarkable,” he whispered.

  She swallowed and he leaned in so close to her that she could feel his hot breath against her skin.

  “Yes?” he asked.

  She licked her dry lips. “What is?” Her voice was cracked and hoarse. It was hardly a voice at all.

  The man stared at her for so long that she wondered if he’d heard her.

  “You are,” he said at last.

  She didn’t understand what he meant. She swallowed and searched for her next question. It had to be there. She’d woken up in a room she didn’t recognize under the watch of a man she couldn’t remember knowing. There had to be a next question, but what was it?

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Who are you?” she said, testing the words one a time.

  He sat back in the chair. “I found you,” he said. “I’m afraid you’ve had a terrible kind of accident.”

  But it wasn’t the answer to her question. She wondered if he’d heard her.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the sound of her own slight breathing. She couldn’t remember having had an accident. Was it a car accident? Had she fallen from something?

  She remembered the dry mud and the forest before that, but she couldn’t see beyond the trees. She remembered that she’d lived in the forest all of her life, but that couldn’t be true.

  She decided that she would ask him about the forest, but when she opened her eyes again, he was gone.

  The room sat still and dark. The sun had set, only she couldn’t see how time had passed. If she’d fallen asleep, she couldn’t remember.

  She didn’t remember much of anything at all, only she felt with a sudden certainty that she didn’t belong where she was and that she had come from somewhere else.

  The forest.

  Chapter Nine

  She listened to the quiet of the room and the house that surrounded it. She opened and closed her hands. She could move, that was good. Had she ever believed she couldn’t?

  A soft knock at the door broke through the heavy shadows, startling her.

  She held her breath and waited for a second knock or for someone to enter. She found herself quietly hoping it would be the man she didn’t know. There was something about him she liked. Something about him felt comfortable, like an old sepia tone photograph.

  “Hello?” she whispered. Her voice still sounded so foreign and she knew that couldn’t be right.

  The door opened slowly and the same man entered the room with a gas lamp swinging beneath a silver tray.

  Her stomach turned with an unexpected amount of excitement, as small as it was.

  “Hello,” he said. He crossed the room and set the tray down at the foot of the bed.

  She tried to sit up and he moved to help her.

  “Thank you,” she said, lightheaded. She swallowed back the hot taste of bile.

  “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked quietly, almost as if he were afraid to disturb her in some way.

  She stared down at the silver tray filled with little silver plates beneath little silver domes. She shook her head and braced at the pain of moving her neck. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “It’s blood sausage,” he said. “Wouldn’t you like to try it?”

  Her throat constricted at the image his words painted. “Not really,” she said.

  He sat in
the chair beside her and examined her face so closely that she was forced to look away.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, sitting back. “It’s been nearly half of a fortnight since you’ve eaten anything at all.” He examined the side of her face. “Do you feel sick?”

  She lifted her eyes to meet his.

  They were gray, more shallow than deep, like cold, forgotten tide pools.

  “Nearly half of a fortnight,” she said, feeling the way the old phrase moved off from her tongue and into the warm air between them. “Did I fall back through time?”

  His words, cadence, and everything about him felt old, though he seemed so young. He was like the elaborately carved wood that furnished the room. Everything sat heavy with dust. She wondered if she did, too.

  “Does it matter to you very much, the time?” he asked.

  She thought about his question. It felt at once strange, but also practical.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think it should, but I don’t think it does.” She stared down at her hands and tried to make sense of her feelings about time, only there was nothing and that didn’t seem to matter.

  “That’s good,” he said. “I feel the same.”

  She looked back at him. She was sure she must know him, but it was impossible to know from where. She didn’t think she would be able to forget a face like his.

  Amnesia. The word floated across her vision like some sad air balloon. She knew, somehow, that real amnesia wasn’t an all-inclusive forgetting of everything. It could be selective and she should still be able to remember certain things, if that’s what she had.

  And she could, couldn’t she?

  She remembered how she felt about this man beside her, that he was like looking at an old photograph. She remembered photographs, but only the idea of them. She remembered cameras. She remembered general things, but nothing very specific, like who she was or what she liked.

  “Who are you?” she asked again.

  “I live here,” he said, as if it were the most apparent answer in the world.

  She turned her palms upward on top of the satin bedsheets because there was nothing else to do. “Do you have a cigarette?” she asked.

  Yes, that was it. She liked to smoke and she’d always known that.

  He pressed his lips together, produced a tin case from his vest pocket, and set to rolling the white paper on the leg of his gray slacks.

  “You smoke,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes,” she said, answering it anyway. “I think I do, anyway.”

  He nodded without looking at her. “Do you remember other things?”

  She looked at her open hands again. It was how she remembered that she liked to smoke, but there wasn’t anything else to be found in the lines of her palms.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think I do.”

  She watched him work in a warm daze. If she felt that she should be afraid, there was nothing in her memory to tell her why that should be the case. There was only the forest and even that was fading.

  “I remember a forest,” she said.

  Chapter Ten

  October 27, 1701

  North of the Laptev Sea

  The dogs were dead and the sky, heavy with snow, threatened to crush the world below.

  The man, once a mountain and now a shadow, knelt over him. “My boy,” he said. “My boy. Are you still there?”

  The boy stared up into his father’s beard, flaked with ice.

  There was nothing to say.

  Time sat cold and unmoving between them.

  His father’s shadow shifted away and he was exposed to the whole of the black sky above.

  A cold cascade of stars painted the sky with a hateful sharpness. Their twinkling pinched the boy’s bones and shattered them deep beneath his frozen skin.

  He closed his eyes and listened in quiet earnest for the familiar sound of fur on snow; wood on ice; of dogs panting; and of leather whipping in the wind.

  But there were no sounds beyond his own ragged breath. He heard nothing else. There was nothing else to hear and there would never be anything else to hear ever again.

  The dogs were dead.

  A small firelight flickered in the white dark. The rest of the world returned, or what was left of it, in all of its frozen lethargy.

  He listened to what was there and not what he wished was there. He listened to the sound of cold paper turning, to his father’s deep cough, and to the lonely wind whistling.

  “The map,” he said, folding the stained parchment and tucking it back between his furs. “It’s wrong.”

  The boy wanted to say that it didn’t matter. Even if the map was right, where could it take them where they had not already been? The frozen wasteland was all the same, from one night to the next, and they’d found nothing.

  Nothing had found them.

  His father’s shadow knelt over him once more. His breath billowed in the cold air between them. “We go on,” he said. It was what he always said.

  No, he wanted to say. We don’t go on. But there was nothing to say and no way to say it. His lips were sealed with spit and blood.

  Time passed over them. It was an hour, a day, a year. The open sled cut through the hardened snow and ushered a howling white noise through the open world.

  He let his eyes wander between the cold stars and wondered, as best he could, at the tiny performance of death.

  It felt so much like nothing. It must have looked like even less.

  Was it how the dogs had felt when they’d died, too?

  Chapter Eleven

  June 7, 1994

  Neverpine, California

  The lines in his face deepened. Although he was in the room with her, he looked so far away. He was somewhere else.

  She watched him work and waited for him to speak.

  He finished rolling the cigarette. He lit it for her with a match from his pocket. “And what do you remember from the forest?” he asked, returning to the cloistered room from wherever he had been.

  She took the cigarette into her mouth. The smoke swirled in front of her.

  The harder she tried to recall the trees and her own being there, the more distant the memory became until finally, it was like the memory of a memory.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just know that I was in a forest.” She paused. “I think I was lost, maybe.” She stared at him and let her mind grope for the edges of a new memory or question that would make sense to ask.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “If I know you,” she said.

  He sucked air in through his teeth. “No, I’m afraid not.”

  She shifted uncomfortably in the bed. Her limbs were stiff and sore. Her legs wouldn’t move. She thought she should be more concerned than she was.

  “I guess you wouldn’t know my name, then,” she said, searching for something to hold onto beyond the fading memory of the forest.

  His gray eyes lit up and his face took on the peculiar look of a little boy who was about to play a game. “What do you want your name to be?”

  She wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the question, but there was nothing to contrast the strangeness of the moment with. It was all there was. There was nothing before or after.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Oh.” He leaned forward. “Come on then, any name at all. Just say it and it’s yours. I always thought names should work that way.”

  “All right.” She stared up at the gilded ceiling. Her throat still ached.

  She tried to imagine a list of names in front of her, but no matter how hard she tried, there was only one.

  “Jolene,” she said, lowering her eyes. It was a pretty name, but there was no telling where it had come from. It might have even been her own name, but there was no way to tell.

  He rested his chin in his hand. “You can choose a middle name, too.”

  She sucked on the cigarette and shrugged at him. There were no other
names.

  At the end of the room, a warm wind billowed the lace curtains inward.

  “Summer?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, reassuringly. “It’s summer.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Jolene Summers. That’ll be my name.”

  “A fine choice,” he said, lifting his head. “And if you’re going to be Jolene Summers, then I’ll be Laurie.”

  “Laurie.” She lowered the cigarette and screwed her face up at him. “It’s a girl’s name, isn’t it?”

  He cocked his head at her. “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Yes,” she said, taking the cigarette back up again. “Laurie. Like Laurence, isn’t it?”

  Laurie, Laurence. Jolene. Other names followed after them. Roger, Luke, Michelle, John, Benny, Beth, Rick. They spilled out, one after the next, a torrent of letters and sounds playing through her mind. Maybe they were people she knew, but she couldn’t find their faces. Maybe she knew no one and they were only names.

  She blew out a crooked line of smoke. She had the strange thought that smoking was helping her to remember. It felt like such a natural thing for her to do.

  “What about a last name, then?” she asked him, quietly eager to pry open other memories if they were there.

  “Laurence Le Gall,” he said without taking any time at all. “Well, Laurie, if you don’t mind. Laurence is so,” he paused to wave his hands through the air, “overly proper.”

  She flicked the ash from her cigarette. “And you’re not overly proper?” She could hear the remnants of some kind of lost personality in her voice. There was no way to tell if it had been her personality, but she was glad to hear it all the same.

  He watched her and said nothing for a time. “Is it strange to you that you don’t know me, this room, or this place, and that you’re not afraid?” He crossed his arms. “Of course, if you are fearful, you hide it exceptionally well.”

  She opened and closed her hands and tried to stretch her legs. They were so difficult to move. “I can’t really move my legs,” she said. “That scares me a little, but not in the way someone might think.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She searched for any words that might convey to him how she felt. She didn’t feel like she was anyone in particular and that didn’t seem to bother her very much. She was also aware of how much it didn’t bother her and, try as she might, there was no way to make herself feel the urgency that she thought anyone else in her position should feel.