by Diana Graves
With stubborn resolve I walked to the front door, but instead of grabbing its handle, I reached for another door altogether. I didn’t mean to, but for some reason I was opening the door to my home office, just to the right of the front door. I was murdered in that room and I’m not sure what I expected to see. The books shelves were empty. My desk and love seat were gone. The only thing that remained was the circle Raphael had trapped me in and my blood stains on the hardwood floors. I was shocked to see such large blood stains after all these years. Looking at them, an electric shiver ran up my spine.
“You’re a real pest,” said a familiar voice.
I spun around, half angry, half scared, because I knew who was with me. Raphael! He was standing just behind me, back out in the hall. He was wearing worn jeans and boots and nothing else. His body was lean and muscular. His light hair was a stylish mess on his head, like swirled frosting on top of a cute guy cupcake. Where did he get the idea for this look, a Calvin Klein catalog? The moment I looked into his mocking cool face, the fear was gone. I felt only rage as I moved fast to attack him. I meant to tear his throat out, but he blocked me, so I slammed my weight into him instead, pinning him against the wall.
“You killed me!” I yelled in his face.
“Don’t look so surprised. I told you I would.”
It was true. He’d threatened to kill me years ago if I didn’t save his human wife, and I didn’t, I couldn’t. She was already dead again when I found her. I say again because she was dead when he fell in love with her. She was living out her afterlife in Hell as part of a deal between her ex-husband and the god Apollo. So long as she was in Hell, Admetus was immortal. When Raphael brought her back to life and married her, Admetus started aging and became hell bent on sending her back to Hell.
“You told me that was a hollow threat!”
“Demons lie,” he said calmly.
“Demon? I thought you were an angel. That’s what the mercenaries you hired to kill me said you were.”
“My previous answer applies,” he said. Right, demons lie. “But really the titles are quite interchangeable. Demon, angel, tomato, tomáto.”
“Was anything you ever said to me true!?”
“Two things. Adia’s soul is in your daughter’s body and I will kill you.”
My brow pinched in thought. The man who infected me with vampirism, used Adia’s blood to do so. Adia herself had long been dead, over a hundred years. She lived on in spirit only, feeding off her brother and then me. She loved me, she mentored me, and then she sacrificed herself to save me. Raphael’s actions didn’t add up.
“Why did you save her soul? She loves me. Saving her seems like a pretty odd thing to do.” Raphael only added to my confusion when he laughed out loud. “Don’t laugh!”
He stopped laughing, but his lips were curled in a grin. “You’re so foolish. You’re all grown up and an undead demigod, but you’re still a silly little girl, aren’t you?” He began laughing again, but I shook it out of him. It felt good to manhandle him. Damn good. Eventually he lost his smile. “Fine!” he scoffed. “You don’t know shit about Adia. She was a pretty evil little lady back in her day, but hey, people change, right? She sacrificed herself to save you.” He scoffed. “I took her soul and shoved it inside your unborn child.”
“Why?”
“To gain your trust—and to make Isobel suffer for what you failed to do.”
Suffer? How would Adia’s soul being inside her make her suffer? And then it hit me. When Adia was living off of her brother, Alistair, it drove him mad. He was stuck inside a living nightmare. I didn’t want that for my baby girl.
“Why are you doing this to me? You know I couldn’t have saved your wife. Admetus had already killed her. There was no way I could have done anything for her. You said as much yourself.”
He pushed me back hard, but he couldn’t budge from where I was holding him. It surprised both of us. He made a strange face and closed his eyes, but when he opened them he seemed startled to see me.
“You’re stronger than I remember and why can I not leave?”
“I am stronger now; even as weak as I am, I’m stronger than you, demon.” I looked him up and down. “I don’t think you can leave while I’m holding you. Must have something to do with the whole demigod thing. Perhaps you should have considered what killing off my last shred of humanity would do.”
He looked mad and maybe a little scared. “I did. That’s why I had you chopped up and thrown into a fucking river.”
“You shouldn’t have outsourced the murdering part of my murder. Contractors always muff it up.”
“I’ll keep that in mind for future reference,” he said.
“What future?” I said, and I pressed my hand firm against his chest. It was smooth and hairless, but my touch went deeper than that. My hand stopped at his skin, but my mind delved deeper into his body, his shell. Raphael himself taught me this cruel little trick. You see, I grew up as an empath only. I could feel the emotions of others, but not all of the time. After my vamp infection, my empathy evolved into mind reading, then mind controlling. But the demon in my hand taught me to do a bit more than control the brain. He showed me that I could manipulate any organ of really any sort of creature. Why would a demon hell bent on my death do such a thing? No clue…
His head went back with clenched teeth. He begged me to stop. I didn’t. I closed my eyes and focused on what I felt inside him. He didn’t have the anatomy of a human. He didn’t have any sort of anatomy at all. His hair, skin and clothes weren’t real. It was fake, like an interactive hologram. On the outside, it felt real, it looked real, but it wasn’t real. It wouldn’t bleed if cut. I opened my eyes and looked at his face, twisted in pain. Was he acting, or did penetrating his shell really hurt?
“You’re not real.”
“I am,” he breathed. “Get your fucking hand out of my body!”
“You’re a projected image—unless,” and I took my hand off of his torso and placed it on his head. He screamed out loud, but I ignored it. I still wanted to kill him after all, but I was also curious. The gods made angels and demons for servitude, but what were they made of? Again my hand traveled through something like light particles, but more dense. I took my hand back. “Where is the image coming from?”
“Me,” he said. “This is all I am, you stupid fucking bitch!”
I thought back on the only other two angels I’d ever met before. There was Raziel. He was made out of great arching beams of light, boiling hot. And then there was Leah. She, like Raphael, had a more human appearance, but she could travel fast, something like the speed of light actually...
“You’re sentient energy?”
He tried to laugh, but only accomplished a weak chuckle. “How are you going to kill that,” he sneered. My eyes never left his as my mind raced for that very answer. “You can’t kill me, Raina! And maybe I can’t kill you either, but I can kill everyone you love.”
“No,” I said softly, but I wasn’t talking to him. I was talking to myself. His threats couldn’t rile me up anymore. He wasn’t going to harm anybody ever again. That much I knew for certain. “No, I can’t kill you. You are energy and energy doesn’t run out or die. It can only be converted, moved.” Thinking out loud I pieced together everything. “You can’t leave so long as I’m touching you. That’s the god in me. I can hold you, I can contain you, but I’m not going to walk around holding your hand for the rest of time.”
“Raina,” he warned when I gave him a most devilish grin.
“If I can hold you and enter your body, then logically I can fold you into mine and keep the world safe from you.”
“Keep the world safe from me!? This putrid rock is full of nothing but insanity and violence! It deserves worse than me. It deserves oblivion! You would think giving a dog a bigger brain would stop him from eating shit and chasing his own tail, but you’d be wrong.”
I slammed him against the wall again. “There is good here, too.”
&
nbsp; “Who are you referring to, the innocent children? At best they’re cannon fodder and at worse they’re the next generation of greedy CEO’s, politicians, druggies, war mongers, rapists, corrupt religious leaders, child abusers, bigots, gang members and terrorists. Or are you referring to the thoughtful people of the world; love and goodwill, the self-sacrificing sorts?” He laughed. “They’re far and few between. Face it, you live in a world where money is king, not empathy.”
“It doesn’t matter what you think. You’re never going to hurt anybody ever again,” I said, and I placed my hand on his chest again, but this time instead of seeping my energy into him, I was taking him into myself for safe storage.
“It doesn’t matter what you do to me!” he shouted in pain. “Everyone you love is still going to die!”
“Everyone mortal eventually dies.”
“No, I mean soon!” he laughed desperately. His image was becoming more and more transparent the more of him I took inside myself. As he was entering my body, I directed his energy to stay in my left hand, like a small nugget of demon. As the energy poured in and compressed, a terrific light was building inside the palm of my hand. “Apollo has begun it! His end-time scenario has been unleased on the world, and he started it here, in Washington.”
“More lies!” I yelled in his quickly vanishing face.
“No,” I heard him laugh, but he was gone from my sight. I was left staring at the wall.
I looked down at the bright light coming from my hand. It was warm, almost too warm. I made a fist so I didn’t have to look at it. I had a murderous demon in my left hand. Great. I still had to run the five sum miles back to Bastion Fatal in the burning daylight. Even better.
I grabbed a sheet off of the sofa in the living room. I tore a small strip off the side and tied it around the palm of my left hand to hide the light. Pulling the rest of the sheet around me to hide my head and arms, I was ready for another midday run.
MY LOVES
AT BASTION FATAL I ran past the human guard at the gate. He didn’t even see me. I was moving pretty fast this time around, but I was sure it had more to do with his eyes being glued to his cell phone. I ran across the parking lot. Back when Adia was master of this vampire compound, back when Bastion Fatal was called Mort Villa, the parking lot was a grassy garden filled with elegant black statues of barguests. Adia loved them. She took in all she could find, which was pretty darn awesome for an “evil” lady, as they were an endangered species even back then. As far as I knew, Damon was Bastion Fatal’s only barguest now.
Bastion Fatal was a brilliant palace, white and red with a gilded glass dome. I climbed the steps to the double-doors, slowing down only long enough to pull them open before running in. Those who were loitering around the entrance only got the briefest of glimpse of me before I was gone and the doors slammed shut.
Inside I took several steps from the door before I lifted the sheet off my head and gazed out at the long corridor. I gasped as I took it all in. I’d walked this corridor so many times before, and nothing had changed since the last, but somehow it looked very different. Before death, I thought this hall looked plain. Marble flooring, marble walls, marble ceiling. I didn’t find it particularly inspiring. But now all those lines and depth of color seemed to move and dance in a way that was mesmerizing. I almost felt like I was walking in outer space.
“Amazing,” I said like a reflex.
But I couldn’t linger long. I didn’t want anyone to recognize me or ask me if I needed help. I can’t imagine it’s every day a vampire wrapped in a sheet and steaming like bacon strolls in with the sun high in the sky. Besides, I wouldn’t know what to tell them, and any explanation would only delay me from seeing my family.
I sped past the elevator to the staircase just beyond. Most of the few people who called Bastion Fatal home, lived on the third and fourth floor, including the master vampire in charge, Alistair. Damon, however, lived and worked two floors down; one floor below the clinic and one floor above the vampire care center or VCC. Both areas were renovated and updated. I didn’t know why the second floor down was not yet completely altered from Adia’s original design like the rest of the Bastion. Last I saw it, the wood paneling was down, the doors were all gone, but nothing else had changed. Maybe Alistair just didn’t know what to do with the space.
As I climbed down the stairs and opened the door, I found that the floor was just as I’d remembered it. Wood walls, missing doors, plastic covering much of everything; a complete stop in the middle of construction. Nothing had changed in five years. Down the hall and to the left was Damon’s classroom, where he taught new vampires the ins and outs of living as a vampire in America. A bit farther and to the right was his office where he worked as Bastion Fatal’s therapist. A bit farther still was his old apartment.
My heart was racing. I didn’t realize just how nervous I was until then. What do you say when you come back from the dead? What kind of psychological impact will it have on our children? And what the hell did I look like?! I had to know. There was no restroom on this floor that I was aware of so I ran to Damon’s classroom to see. He didn’t have a mirror in there, but Bastion Fatal was built on the shores of the Puget Sound, half on land and half in the water, and in Damon’s classroom one wall was thick glass, covered in dark green algae. It was easy to see one’s dark reflection in the glass.
As I walked past the long tables and plastic chairs I noted from afar just how silly I looked. As I approached the glass wall I let the sheet fall to the floor in a steaming heap, and there I stood in a long green dress, uneven dark red hair, and thin scars streaking across my skin like Alistair’s marble walls. I ran my hand down my cheek and I could feel every dip and curve of the scars. I rarely ever wore makeup. I always felt like a clown in it, but maybe a little bit was in order. At least until the scars faded.
The lines were distracting, but I still looked like me. My eyes and lips were still just as deep a red as ever. My skin was ashen. Only blood would put the color back into my cheeks. But my hair was bugging me the most. It was so uneven that I thought maybe Nick sewed my scalp pieces on wrong. It was an easy fix though. Damon’s desk was in the corner of the room. Every desk has the office essentials, right? Pens, pencils, paper, stapler, hole-puncher and scissors. I rummaged through his drawers and, “Bingo.”
With office scissors in hand and a dark glass wall as a mirror, I did my best to make me look a bit less like some cheap doll and a bit more like myself. I was as good as I’d get without a good meal, a long shower and my own clothes. If I had blood for the pumping, my heart would have been making a racket in my chest as I stepped out of that room.
I stood just outside the door to Damon’s apartment for a long while. I was so adamant to see my family, so damn dead set on it. But now that it had come, I wasn’t sure how to make that first move. Do I just knock? What do I say? How will they react? Will Thomas be scared of me? What of my baby? She’s not a baby anymore. It’s been five years. Has Damon moved on? Probably…I so didn’t want to walk in on him and his new girlfriend—or wife!
“Raina?” someone said softly from behind me. That I didn’t hear him approaching was a testament to how deep I was in my own head.
I turned around and Alistair was standing just outside the elevator, but not for long. Within seconds he’d traveled the hundred-odd feet that stood between us and looked down at me from an impressive height. Most likely he hadn’t changed at all since I’d died. Not physically at least. But like the walls in the main hall, he looked different. His golden hair seemed more vibrant, his true blue eyes appeared nearly neon blue. Even his smell was different. Before he smelt of whatever charming cologne he’d chosen to sport that day, but now I could smell him. Past the artificial scent of his perfume was something green and crisp. In my mind I pictured wild currents hitting a rocky shore, and beyond that was grassy plains with trees and mountains in the distance. But the one thing that didn’t change with death was the overwhelming pull between us. It was
there like an itch begging to be scratched. Just being this close to him made the hair on my arms stand on end. If I was anxious before, I was way out there in panic-land now!
“You’re alive,” he said. His eyes and his voice were filled with concern, but I didn’t know what to say. Just before I died I’d kissed him and told him that I’d loved him, which was true. For years I tried to ignore how I felt about him, because of our complicated past and because I was with Damon, whom I love also. His eyes moved over me, quickly taking in my appearance. “What happened to you?” But before I could answer him, I heard Damon’s door open behind me. Alistair looked up, past me.
“Alistair?” I heard Damon ask. “You’re up early.” Slowly I turned to meet his black eyes; pitch black like everything else about him except his smile. His teeth were whitest white against so much darkness. The contrast made for a dazzling smile that always warmed my heart to see. I wished he was smiling when he looked down on me.