by Diana Graves
Damon and I walked up to the front desk to get the keys to our room. The man standing behind it was all wrapped up in old moth-eaten strips of cotton. The skin that did show through was painted to look dried and flaky. A nametag was pinned to his costume reading, ‘Leo, Night Manager.’
“You guys go all out for the holidays,” I said. “It’s a little crazier here than I expected.”
He shrugged with a barely visible smile. “Mostly we celebrate just this one holiday. It’s good for business,” Leo said. “We don’t have any more vacancies for walk-ins, though. I’m sorry.”
Damon pulled a red wallet out of his black jeans and showed Leo his ID. “We should already be checked in. I sent that girl on the bookcase ahead of us. Two rooms with two queen beds and a crib in one?”
“Miss Omale, Yeah. You must be Mr. Barguest. Here’s your keys,” said Leo. “Your room is on the top floor, all the way down the hall. Miss. Omale said that you’d want to go to bed as soon as you checked in, so I gave you a room far away from the lobby. Hopefully, you can get some sleep.”
Damon smiled and thanked Leo for his thoughtfulness, then he turned to me with the old skeleton key in hand and said, “I can’t wait to go to bed, but I wish I could stay up and trick-or-treat you and the kids.”
“I’m sorry, honey,” I frowned. “I’m not taking Thomas out tonight either. I don’t want Isobel out in the cold all night. Katie!” I called out.
“Yeah!” she yelled back over the fun-loving roar of the room. Thomas was play-beating a monster with his fake sword and Everett was singing a song from the Adventure Time cartoon while playing Katie’s red guitar.
“You got Thomas?”
“Yeah, oh yeah, we got ourselves a little gang of youths here. We’re going to pilfer this town for their CANDY!” she yelled the last bit louder and it was directed at the kids in the lobby. Together they shouted happily as one, “YEAH!”
“Shall we?” asked Damon, making a grand gesture to the swooping staircase just past the lobby. I picked up Isobel’s car seat and let him lead the way.
A STROLL WITH MELVERN
THE GOTHIC VICTORIAN theme was continued in rooms; pale furniture, rich woods, thick drapes, gaudy light fixtures, tall ceilings and creepy paintings. Once Damon set our bags down on the overstuffed loveseat near the bathroom door, he laid down on one of the queen sized bed, with its silky blue comforter and many white fluffy pillows, and fell sleeping almost instantly.
I took Isobel out of the car seat. “Are you hungry?” I asked her, and for a long while we sat comfortably on the sofa, her eating and me watching the television on a low volume. When she fell asleep in my arms, I gently changed her diaper and laid her down to sleep in the crib. Newborns don’t sleep for long periods of time. I had maybe an hour or two before she’d be awake again. A smarter woman would spend that time sleeping. I never claimed to be smart and I was in desperate need of fresh air and some time to myself.
Samhains was my favorite holiday, and yes, somewhere out there was my adorable son having the time of his life, but I needed to be alone to think clearly. I walked down back roads and wooded trails, avoiding the more festive parts of Darkness, though I could hear the merriment in the distance. And for a time I was alone, pondering a riddle. How do you kill a man capable of rapidly healing, immune to any weapon we could fashion, even fire? And it wasn’t just Orestes. He had a small army of fellow hunters, and the only thing holding them at bay was some imaginary line drawn in blood like a constellation in the night’s sky.
“You’re thinking so loudly that I was drawn to you,” said Melvern.
I jumped with fright and clasped my hands over my chest. “What the hell?” I breathed. “You scared me.”
He just looked at me plainly with the moon reflecting in his eyes like some damn alley cat. “I’m sorry,” he said but he didn’t sound it.
He was walking up the trail toward me, dressed in his usual fashion; as though time had stopped for him the moment he was turned into a vampire, at least where fashion and age were concerned. He’d always be a handsome thirty-something and he’d always favor his leather clothes, traditional to the mid-westerner Native Americans of a time long before the old world invaded this continent.
“Well, aren’t you an expert in all things mental? Just block me if I’m bothering you with all my loud thinking,” I said, and it was all too obvious that I was too cold and irritable to entertain him, but either it didn’t register with him or he didn’t care. I’d bet good chocolate that he just didn’t give a damn.
He walked right up to me, entering my personal bubble and put his arm around my shoulders. “No, Raina,” he said, guiding me forward. “I think I’m just the company you need.”
“Oh, I don’t think so. You’re intrusive and deceptive and I need to be alone right now, so if you don’t mind.”
“I’ll give you intrusive, but when have I ever deceived you?”
“Oh, let me think—how about the night we met? You put images in my mind of us fucking to see if I’d hit on you because if I did I was no good for your beloved Sheriff Mato, who, by the way, by the way, is a total sleaze! He was screwing me and every other girl in this town, no doubt.”
Melvern stopped us and looked down at me. “He’s not that bad. I would know,” he said, pointing to his head.
I pushed his hand away from his noggin, “He’s a man-whore.”
He laughed then. “Man-whore? The women aren’t paying him. Oh, Raina, I do owe you an apology.”
“You think?”
“Mato is a complicated man.”
“Yes, yes, I see how complicated fucking every woman you meet can be,” I said with just a little bit of sarcasm.
“Everyone has a history, Raina. It might surprise you to know that you’re not the only person here with a tragic past.”
“What’s Mato’s story then?”
“He was stolen from his family over three-hundred years ago. He was just a boy of seven when Olathia’s people killed his parents in front of him and took him. Back then Olathia and I didn’t share Darkness, as we do now. Darkness didn’t exist. She had her nest of vampires and I had mine. Her nest had their customs and we had ours. In Olathia’s nest they stole children and fed on them until adulthood and then they turned them, but between this and that the children were half starved sex slaves and food, nothing more.”
“Fuck.”
“Indeed. He was still human when I met him and the abuse was all he knew. I turned him myself so that Olathia would have no power over him.”
Melvern was Mato’s vampire daddy? “Olathia let you?”
“She did, reluctantly. When we joined our nests to hide from the Europeans, we made many compromises, Olathia and I. Her people had to lose their taste for children, in every way.”
I swallowed hard and suddenly felt compelled to fetch Thomas and take him home that instant, crazy ancient assassins or no.
“Don’t fret, Raina. No child has been harmed here in any sort of manner for hundreds of years. I would know if they had been. Your son is quite safe. In fact I’d go so far as to say this is the safest town in America.”
“Maybe I have too little faith in people, but it’s hard to believe all those vampires just stopped partaking in their sick jollies overnight.”
Melvern put his large strong hands out where I could see them. “These hands killed many of Olathia’s vampires and I do not regret tearing out a single heart. I will not bear the suffering of children, not at all. You and I share this passion and it was because of it that I thought you would be a healthy match for my poor Mato. It took me years to break him out of the shell he hid in to survive in Olathia’s nest. What you see of him now is the best he’s ever been. A man of the law, fair handed and strong willed.” Melvern shrugged his strong shoulders. “I’ll admit that he is a bit of a slut. He used to be worse. He used to seek out people who would hurt him physically, beyond the point of pleasure. Some find pain pleasurable in itself, but I knew his mind
. I knew he didn’t enjoy the pain. He was punishing himself.”
“What did you think would come of us, me and Mato?” I asked.
“Honestly, I didn’t know. But I hoped that your kindness would make him more open, maybe force him out of this bad habit of breaking hearts, especially his own.”
“You thought if he dated me it would change him? I don’t think people change that easily.”
“People change if they have a good enough reason. You are everything he’s ever wanted in a partner: selfless to your core, kind hearted, brave and loyal, and you’re not ugly.”
I gave that last comment two unenthusiastic thumbs way up. Yay, I’m not ugly… But I didn’t agree with the loyal part. I loved Damon, yet I had wandering thoughts of other men. He thought I was beautiful and clever, but I was a horrible person.
“Raina!” he said.
I stomped my foot down hard, “Damn it, Melvern. Stay out of my fucking head!”
“No, you’re too damn interesting. Stop thinking of yourself so harshly. Everyone on this planet has a wandering mind, Raina, even little old ladies think about sex, sex with their spouses and with different people. They’re just thoughts, and last I checked, it wasn’t a crime to picture the woman who delivers your mail naked on your bed and bleeding lightly from two small puncture wounds on her left breast while you give her a foot massage…”
“Um,” I stammered. I did not need to know that. Wow.
“Anyway, my plan didn’t work. Mato’s loose habits scared you off and now you’re happy and in love with another man. Mato will always regret losing you, but he knew what he was doing and he knew you wouldn’t approve. I’m sorry.”
I was still mad at Mato, but I waved my hand weakly and said, “Eh, it’s not like the sex was awful.”
“No, you wouldn’t still be thinking about it if it was horrible,” he joked.
“Ha-ha.”
“I’m done with girl-talk,” he said. “Follow me.” And he walked ahead of me. Acting against my better judgment, I followed him. He led me off the trail and into the deep thick black forest. We walked on and on, weaving treacherously through the plant life until so much time had passed that I began to think Isobel might wake soon. “She’s asleep still, Raina,” he said loudly with a backward glance in my direction.
“You can read that from her?” I asked. “From this distance?”
“Yes, her mind is quiet for the most part, but she is dreaming; nonsense images and confused emotions.”
“Where are we going?”
“Read my mind,” he said simply.
“You know I can’t. You’re a vampire.”
He stopped and looked back at me. “You read Nick, usually. He seems to have learned to block you, though, like your mom. If you can read him, you can read me. Just try it.”
I gave him a cocked eyebrow but I tried to read his mind. I opened that part of myself that could do such things, the same part of myself that killed that man for Raphael, but there was nothing. I took a calming breath and closed my eyes to help me concentrate, but the only inner voice I could hear was my own.
He chuckled at me and my eyes flew open, full of anger. “I told you I couldn’t do it. I don’t know why I can read Nick’s mind, or could. I thought it had something to do with the Goddess that brought me back to life using his life force.”
“Maybe that’s true, but when I was a new vampire,” he said making his way to me. “I could only read the minds of vampires, male vampires to be precise. And for one-hundred years that remained the case, only male vampires. Then I met a female vampire for the first time and she was silent to me for five years or so. We became friends and eventually over time I began hearing her in my mind the way I heard the men, and it changed how I felt about women.”
“Wait—what? You didn’t know any female vampires for one hundred years?”
“I was turned into what I am today by a small group of men with the affliction. They were evil men, besides being vampires and feeding off of their fellow man. They would devastate small tribes—drain every man and child, and keep the women to rape until they died of starvation or blood loss, whichever came first. Sometimes, if a man begged for his life earnestly enough, they would infect him and take him, but never a woman or child. They just died. As the nest grew and I became a master vampire, I was made their leader. It was a cushy job. I didn’t have to hunt anymore. My legion brought me women to feed on and entertain me. I took pity on a woman who pleased me greatly and made her a vampire in secret. It was considered a perversion among our nest.”
“Who was she?”
“Just a woman,” he said with sad downcast eyes. “It doesn’t matter. She’s gone now, but she taught me two things; one being that women are equal to men in every way and two, in order to read a mind you must find their wavelength; like changing the radio station.”
“Wait! You thought female vampires were a perversion?” I asked.
“Yes, it was how I was brought up to believe, and Olathia’s taste in lovers didn’t persuade me otherwise. When first our two nests met, we declared war on each other. We fought for half a century, bloody battles. The only thing that stopped our war was the war European settlers’ declared on us. Wisely, we put aside our differences and joined together to better hide ourselves in the mountain.”
“Olathia’s people gave up kidnapping, slavery and pedophilia, and your nest gave up rape filled chauvinism?”
“Yes, in a manner of speaking. We knew we couldn’t feed on humans or we would draw the attention of more humans, so they were off the menu anyway. We let all the children who were already in Olathia’s care at the time grow into adulthood and they chose to either become vampires or grow old. The handful of native families that live among us now are the descendants of those children.”
“The vampires of Darkness have quite a past,” I said. I was trying not to think less of them with this new information, but it was pretty much impossible. I always thought little of Olathia because of her promiscuity, but pedophilia? That’s harder to overlook. Though, almost all vampires are guilty of murder among other crimes. It’s easy to hold that knowledge in the abstract, and just think of them as sun-challenged humans, but to have it explained to you made the rape, murder, slavery and worse so much harder to deal with.
“Name a civilization that doesn’t have a lot to atone for. But I didn’t bring you out here for a history lesson,” Melvern said. If he took offense to my new unkind thoughts toward him he didn’t show it.
“Why did you bring me out here?”
“To help you answer that question that keeps playing over and over again in your mind. How do you kill an unknowable number of men who have been granted immortality by the gods, whose skin can’t be punctured or burnt? How do you keep the people you love safe from that kind of unstoppable force?”
My eyes were wide with fear and hope. “Do you know how?”
“I saw what you did to that man the demon asked you to kill. You tore his inside up with your mind. One on one, you might be able to take a single man down.”
I looked down at the dark ground and sighed. “No, I don’t think that will work. They’d just heal whatever damage I inflict as quickly as I can do it, and while I’m focused on one man, the other dozen or so will be killing my family.”
“That’s why you need to learn how to expand your range. Stand in front of me and close your eyes.” I did what he asked but I still had my doubts. Maybe I could accomplish something if I had the locket that the Goddess left me, the one Nick stole from Mom. Maybe I could ask one of my cousins to bring me my box of magical items when they came up the next day. “With your eyes closed, can you tell me if you sense any minds out there in the woods?” he whispered in my ear.
“No, I can’t sense anything.”
“Telepathy is simple once you realize that all minds send out a signal, which you then interpret into data, information. Usually humans are within your reach, and they’re so easy, your mind doesn’t ev
en try to look past them to other options. Out here in seclusion your advanced mind will seek out contact and for the first time it will look for something not so human. There are animals in this forest, hundreds within a fifty foot radius of us; you just have to find that signal.”
“You want me to read the minds of animals?” I asked.
“Yes. Once you’ve found a different signal, it will be easier to find others.”
“Like a domino effect.”
“That’s a good analogy, yes.”
I took a deep breath and concentrated. I combed through the distance, listening intently to the sounds of the mountain. I heard running water and insects and the soft “woos” of an owl. I heard the owl swoop down from the tree, his wings cutting through the air. A thrill ran up my back. It felt like a great plunge down on a rollercoaster ride. There was something in the underbrush, something small and hungry. I felt its hunger pains and my hands found my own stomach to clutch in pain. Then there was a sharp sting in my back and my feet were no longer on the ground. Fear smacked into me like a bulldozer and Melvern caught me or I would have fallen back. I was in the clutches of the owl! I squirmed and thrashed my tiny mouse claws at the spotted owl, but it was useless. He had me and he slammed my body down on a tree’s thick limb. I’d never been up this high before. I squeaked in protest as the owl’s beak tore into my neck.
“Raina!” I heard Melvern yell. I opened my eyes and saw him kneeling over me, holding me in his arms. It took me a moment to register that I was on the ground, shivering with fear. “You had a choice between predator and prey and you chose prey?”
“It didn’t feel like a decision. I just switched sides. I’ve always loved owls. That’s why I was drawn to him, but when I saw what his intentions were, I couldn’t be a part of that.”
“You are a predator, Raina. You’re a bounty hunter and a living vampire and soon only blood will sustain you.”
“I only hunt bad guys and the liquid diet can wait for now.”