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

by Lily Levi

  There was an inexplicable calm that sat wrapped around her like a heavy shawl. She never wanted to take it off.

  “I mean,” she said. “I’m not afraid. Maybe I should be, but I feel,” she trailed off. She wasn’t sure what she felt. It was a mixture between not caring and being unable to care even if she thought she might want to. It was as though she’d come home from a journey longer than time and was too tired to be afraid, or that she’d been afraid for a very long time with nothing to be afraid of.

  She felt so numb that she hardly cared that she was reclining in a bed that belonged to a total stranger. She didn’t care that she couldn’t move her legs with no explanation for why. She didn’t even really care that she didn’t remember anything about herself, or where she’d come from, or where she was going to go.

  It simply didn’t matter.

  When the sun fell, he left her to herself again.

  She laid her head back down against the pillow and silently wondered if anything had ever truly mattered.

  Chapter Twelve

  Riley waited for him at the top of the second floor. She followed him up to the fourth floor and padded after him to the gallery door.

  Laurie threw a sidelong glance down the dark hall to Maman’s room. The door was shut. He’d taken to locking it after bringing the girl – Jolene Summers – home. It was a small precaution to take.

  He bent down and touched the bloodhound’s long, silky ears. “We’ve done it,” he whispered.

  They stepped into the gallery together.

  The room was as just he’d left it. He moved down the long wall and pushed back the heavy drapes.

  Sunlight flooded into a place that might not deserve to see the sun at all, but he could never help himself. In the very center of the room, he’d placed a red armchair and a short round table beside it. A black stool and his cherry wood easel, covered with a white cloth, sat nearer the windows. He hadn’t known what to do with Jolene’s portrait after he’d finished, so he covered it.

  He sat in the armchair and lit a rolled cigarette from the table. Riley lay down at his feet. Together, they let their eyes wander over the framed portraits that covered the whole of the wall opposite the windows.

  The many eyes stared back down at them, although not unkindly, but with an intense knowing that forced him to look away from time to time. It was, in his experience, the best way to mull over certain hiccups in one’s daily routine; to be aware of one’s self in a most exaggerated way.

  Riley sighed at his feet with the same tired satisfaction that he felt.

  The thing had been unexpectedly successful and Jolene Summers – if that was her name or wasn’t, it didn’t quite matter – was no longer dead.

  The same sort of blood transfusion had worked with spiders and a half-eaten tabby cat, who had slunk away into the woods. The most significant difference was that he couldn’t ask a spider or a half-eaten cat what they remembered of their life before. He couldn’t tell if they retained the essence of what they’d once been, or if they’d returned as something new. Was the soul the same? Could it keep the same bond with the same body, even after parting through death?

  He hoped so. Now that his father’s body was lost, Maman was the only one who might know anything about what had happened to him as a boy in the Arctic wastes. Without her, he’d need to find another way, only there was no other way.

  He’d spent three hundred years sustained by pig’s blood for the singular purpose of knowing.

  In the portraits before him, his painted gray eyes seemed to narrow ever so slightly.

  He stared into them and remembered. He’d only been eight-years-old, but how could he forget?

  He could see that Maman was drunk. She was always drunk now. She tottered against his dresser to keep herself upright. She frowned at him. “Boy,” she said. “Boy. Why don’t you walk?”

  He lowered his brush and watched how she watched him.

  Her neck craned forward and her watery eyes bulged out from their sockets. “Swallow blood, your Papa says it’s good. Try it, try it.”

  Riley growled from the foot of his bed.

  “Francoise.” Monsieur Marteaux stepped into the room behind her. He took her in his arms and pulled her away gently from the dresser and back down through the dark hall.

  Maman had never said what she’d said again, and he had never asked her what she’d meant by it.

  It was enough that he remembered and did as she’d asked.

  He looked away.

  He was lying to himself. The first one hundred years had been, in many ways, unexceptional. It had been the normal life of a man. Except, and this was a very large except, the night of his twentieth birthday, the same evening as Maman’s internment into the Le Gall family tomb.

  He had not attended.

  Swallow blood, Maman had said. What a strange thing to say to a boy.

  Depressed with the sudden loss of Maman and his own moody inclinations, he’d done as she’d commanded. Was it not a command?

  He’d grown accustomed to the salty taste of blood as a boy. Afraid, as all little boys are wont to be, he took only small amounts – a lick, a sip from the dark shadows of the kitchen – and told no one.

  He grew stronger. He could walk again without the use of a cane and wooden braces. Was there a correlation? Being only eight, he was sure that there was.

  Perhaps blood was some kind of answer, or perhaps he was healing on his own. There was no way to tell except through the experiment that consisted entirely of consuming more blood.

  Maybe Maman had known something. Now, of course, he was sure that she had.

  In his own way, he hated her for it.

  And so he drank more than brandy the night of her internment and he slept better than any night before that and any night since.

  In the morning, he was brand new, although he couldn’t have said how. Was it his skin? His energy? Was it his imagination?

  He found, with time, that he could intake less blood and continue the aging process. The same worked in the reverse.

  He had his flights of fancy and living forever was one of them, as it is for all young men. He’d never expected to find eternal youth. He had never asked for it.

  And then there was Riley. At the time, she was nearing sixteen-years-old and who has not thought that they should like to keep their best friend forever? Beyond himself, she was his first true experiment into what could be done. He’d held her still and given her his own blood and now, three centuries later, she still sat at his feet.

  The years passed on.

  He’d had his loves – oh, Elise – and certain other adventures that all men have. He felt very deeply that there was some reason rooted in the human psychological makeup for why no one tended to live longer than seventy, eighty, one hundred years. What lay beyond that was a peaceful sort of madness that he himself had come to know quite intimately.

  He brought himself back into the gallery where he sat and lowered the cigarette from his mouth. He would learn from Jolene. If he could help her remember who she’d been, perhaps he could do the same with Maman. But, say that he could not help her; say that she could not remember a life before the forest, if that was the one thing she did remember, would he not be responsible for her?

  And for how long?

  He put out the cigarette and forcefully turned his mind back to the real trouble in his heart. He would find some way to sort things out as he always did, but where the girl had been dead for perhaps no longer than an hour or two, Maman had been gone for over two centuries. Her mummified corpse was so fragile that it might be unable to accept the return of a soul, hers or not.

  He stood from the chair and paced the long gallery. He paused at the furthest window.

  Tall pines rose up in dark green waves, one after the other. Somewhere between them, the forgotten road wound itself lazily up through the hills, met the highway, ran through the aging town, snaked back through the trees, the mountains, the rain, the dar
k, and the snow.

  He imagined the desecrated tabby cat, still slinking between the trees, months after its own terrible resurrection.

  It was impossible, of course. The cat would be dead and would never be brought back again.

  Resurrection. How very strange to think it was possible and then to know it was, to see and feel lost things recreated. Of course, the spiders had not fared as well as he’d hoped. He’d let them die in their crumpled black bunches and then attempted to bring them back in the same way a second time.

  They hadn’t returned to the world.

  He’d come to the inevitable conclusion that a thing couldn’t die if it was already dead. The once-living could be brought back from the dead, but for the living dead, there were no second chances.

  He traced the lines of a branch against the window.

  No, if a dead thing were to die a second time, the death would be more of a fading away. It was the only way he knew to think of it. The spiders, the cat, the girl, himself, none of them could be truly alive, but they could seem it very well.

  And Riley? She was alive. She had never died. She could be brought back if anything were to happen to her. He often took great comfort in this thought.

  If only he knew better how the whole thing worked and why it worked. Something had happened long ago in the wind and ice, but the memory was lost to him. He remembered only the slicing of snow beneath his head and the stars that were almost too bright to be stars. The rest was like a murky dream. The harder he tried to remember it, the more it slipped away.

  He shut the heavy drapes over the window at the end of the gallery and woke Riley from her nightmare.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Night fell and found him in his father’s study across the hall from where Maman lay, a quiet husk of who she once was.

  He sat at the carved desk with the leatherbound log set open, and a half-empty bottle of bourbon in his lap. He drunkenly dipped the pen into its inkwell.

  The candle flickered at the turn of the page. His eyes swam and he noted the date.

  ‘Jolene Summers’, he wrote. Twenty-five, twenty-six. Dead an hour or less. Strangled. No real questions, no interest. Remembers forest and cigarettes. Sleeps like the cat. Calm. No appetite. No fear or apparent anxiety. Slight sense of humor retained or gained – impossible to tell. Speaks well. Cannot walk. Bedbound.

  His head seemed to float just above where it normally sat. He set the pen beside the inkwell.

  “I did it,” he whispered up to the head of the mountain lion posted on the other side of the room. His father had killed it and even as a boy, he’d hated it. Nevertheless, it had become a dear companion to whom he spoke his secrets when sitting drunkenly in his father’s study, just as he did now.

  He shut the book. He looked slowly, sullenly around the room he’d come to loathe. “I did a horrible thing,” he told the books, the desk, and the ghost of his heartless father, wherever he was.

  But there hadn’t been another other choice. He’d had to bring her back. He had to know that it could be done. He’d tried everything else. He’d looked everywhere.

  But there was something terrible about what he’d done to the girl and he couldn’t force himself to look squarely at it.

  The room, his father’s only place of respite in his last days, would not share its secrets. He’d overturned every drawer and every wall-pinned map. He’d leafed through the books quickly at first and then, when the years passed into more years, he folded slowly through the pages, sometimes reading the books themselves if they interested him enough. If his father had written anything in the pages with his own hand, he would’ve found it, but there was nothing to be found.

  No, Maman was the answer. Her brittle skin was like the pages of an old book he had yet to read. Hadn’t she been the one to suggest he consume blood? She’d heard something or read something his father had written. She knew something and he would find out what it was.

  Taking the bourbon up from his lap, he shuffled out from the study and into the hall. He would do the thing he had not wanted to do.

  There would never be a time more right or less right. It was all the same now. He couldn’t let himself be afraid.

  He let himself unlock Maman’s door. Something told him the transfusion wouldn’t work and the mechanical-tube heart wouldn’t beat, so it was all right to go inside and try; to know at last that the thing couldn’t be done.

  He set the bottle of bourbon onto the carpet.

  It wouldn’t work. She’d been dead for too long and it wouldn’t work. It couldn’t work.

  This is what he told himself would be true.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It didn’t matter.

  Nothing would happen. There would be nothing.

  Maman’s skin, taut and papery, didn’t twitch like he’d expected it to in his dreams; in his nightmares. Her black eyes didn’t move, or flicker, or take on any signs of returned life. Her cracked lips bared her broken yellow teeth, just as they had when he’d found her.

  He stood over her and watched for a long time. Nothing moved, but still he watched and he watched, afraid to miss it. Perhaps there would only be a small window of life. He wouldn’t miss it. He couldn’t miss it. She was the only one left in the world with an answer to give him.

  When Riley’s incessant howling finally brought him back, he saw that he’d kicked over the can of pig’s blood and the carpet at his feet was stained brown.

  He picked it up and seated himself next to Maman’s side.

  He would wait.

  When the morning light flooded through the room, he continued to wait. He gave her more of his own blood to mix with the pig’s blood. He adjusted the small, whirring motor next to her head. He turned it off. He turned it on.

  He waited.

  The morning fell into the afternoon. The afternoon drifted into an ember-colored evening.

  He stood.

  “Come,” he said quietly, moving away.

  Riley followed him from the room and he shut the door behind them. He stood in the dark of the hallway for a long while. His head throbbed with bourbon and heat. The tabby cat had reanimated within minutes. Jolene had taken more time. If Maman were to return, it would inevitably take longer.

  He locked Maman’s bedroom door with an unsteady hand and moved slowly down the dark hall. He descended the stairs with care.

  He stopped on the third floor, the floor he always thought of as his, despite the fact that the whole house was now his.

  He stepped into the washroom adjacent to the room he’d claimed for his own when everyone else had gone.

  Alone, he gripped the side of the porcelain basin.

  The oval mirror showed a face that wasn’t his own, haggard and worn. The years, decades and centuries, swam beneath his skin. They threatened to break free and sometimes he thought to let them.

  He splashed the cool water against his face and through his hair. He lifted the vase and washed the blood from his hands. It swirled down the drain in a pink spiral. Taking up a straight razor, he set to work on making himself presentable.

  If there was one thing he could pride himself in above all else, it was an impeccable sense of self-maintenance. He kept himself clean and trim, physically, emotionally, and psychologically. Going mad, that was his fear, though no less great than the fear of already having gone mad and not knowing it. Still, the easiest precaution was an adherence to a kind of rigorous routine surrounding one’s own hygiene. If he let that go, all else would fall behind in a fervid succession. He’d seen it in men and women, as young as thirty and forty-years-old.

  He cut the side of his jaw and matted the blood away with the back of his hand.

  He visited Jolene for no longer than an hour. He was irritable and didn’t want to upset her, but he had to upkeep his obligations to her. He could not let her go lonely.

  Afterwards, before the sun finished setting over the cold bay, he settled into his own rooms. A sordid sense of disappointmen
t wrapped him inside of its dark folds.

  He closed his eyes against the world that had been set on fire with the hot orange hues of summer.

  In the morning, he checked again on the dried corpse of Maman.

  His heart sank at the sight of her.

  She hadn’t moved. Nothing had changed.

  He locked the door behind him.

  With Riley at his heels, he moved an oak wood easel into Jolene’s room and set a small white canvas onto its face.

  Jolene folded her hands over the bed sheets. “I don’t know how to paint,” she said. “Or, I guess I don’t remember if I know how to paint.”

  He set the cleaned palette at her side. “That’s all right.” He watched how her eyes moved mechanically from the canvas to the palette and back again. “If you don’t know how to paint, you’ll make the ugliest paintings. And I shall hang them all about this room for us both to admire.”

  Her high, clear laughter filled the musty air. It was unexpected and reminded him so much of Elise. Oh, how she had laughed and laughed. She’d been the happiest girl in the world and he’d joyfully let himself believe that it was because of him.

  A slight sense of humor – retained or gained, he’d written of Jolene. He hoped it was retained.

  She ran her fingers over the palette. “I’ve noticed you have an accent,” she said. “It’s really light, kind of faded, but it’s there. What is it?”

  He sat down beside her and adjusted the small pots of paint along the bedside table. “Well,” he said, “my family was from France, but I was born here. My tutor, he was from France. Surrounded by the French, they say.” He laughed. “No one ever said that, of course.”