by Evie Byrne
Helena ate a pint of ice cream for dinner and drank most of a bottle of wine while she channel surfed in tedious circles.
Around nine, Scully jumped out of her lap and went to look out the sliding doors, her pointy ears on high alert. Helena cupped her hands against the glass to see the balcony in the darkness. He wasn't out there. She went back to the couch.
Scully trotted into the kitchen and back, went downstairs and came back and stood in front of Helena with one paw in the air, her button eyes bright. It was the "I want something" pose.
"As if I'm going to let you out so that you can tangle with some critter in the back yard. I don't think so."
In answer, Scully yipped, trotted to the head of the stairs and yipped some more.
"You peed an hour ago."
But she only barked more and ran up and down the stairs and yipped until Helena hauled her sorry ass off the couch and waddled—she was sore, like he'd predicted—down the stairs to the ground level. She looked out the back door window. Nothing moved in the yard. She had a morbid fear of coyotes eating her dog. Scully whined and danced at her feet.
"Okay, but I'll go out first." Holding her dog back with one foot, she slipped out the door, tripped on something lumpy and fell on it. It groaned. Helena screamed and scrambled to her feet. Scully barked in high, hysterical notes. Alex was lying face down on the ground.
"Alex! Oh my God!" The first thing she thought was that he'd been shot by the police. Flashes of her first aid class came back to her. Check airway, breathing, treat for shock. How? Dang oh dang. He groaned. At least he was breathing.
"Alex? What happened?" She rolled him onto his back and gasped. Even in the dark, she could see his face was a mess: rough, misshapen, wrong. "Don't worry, I'm calling 911."
"No." He caught her wrist, his grip wet and boney. Wrong. Was he burnt? He took several gasping breaths before he could continue. "Don't."
"The police, all that, doesn't matter now." It was shock. He was hurt so bad he didn't even know he was hurt. "Alex, you need medical attention."
"No. Inside."
Helena bit her lip. Even his voice was strange, his words slurred. She decided to take him inside, then call 911.
Making a terrible pained noise, he came up on all fours. She tried to help him to his feet, but he hissed at her. So she just opened the door and let him crawl inside.
"Baze…ment," he wheezed.
She opened another door and watched, open-mouthed, as he half tumbled, half slithered down the basement steps. At the foot of the stairs, he curled into a fetal position and went still. She flicked on the bright overhead lights. What she saw made her wretch. Wine and ice cream came up her throat and she spewed over the stair railing, choking on bittersweet bile.
Every inch of his face was bubbled and peeling and shining with sweat or pus.
And he had no hair.
"Oh God. Oh God. I'll be right back." She was calling the ambulance. Now.
He put out an imploring hand. "Call Ma." Red and intense, his eyes burned in his skull-like face, completely sane and demanding her cooperation. He fumbled for his phone and pushed it toward her across the concrete floor. "Hel…call."
It stopped only a few inches from his horrible, blackened fingertips. Numb with horror, she drifted the rest of the way down the stairs and picked up the phone. Her knees shook so hard she had to sit down beside him. First she'd call his mother, then 911, no matter what he said. In the contacts menu she found the entry "MA".
Someone picked up before she even heard a ring. "Sasha?" said a woman with a smoky voice.
Who was Sasha? "Mrs. Faustin? My name is Helena MacAllister…"
"You have my boy safe? He's with you now? He lives?"
"Y…yes…but he's been hurt and he won't let me call for help."
The woman muttered something in Russian, or what she assumed was Russian. "No, you do not call for help. Your hospitals are not for our kind. They wouldn't know what to do with him, then in the morning, poof!"
Our kind? What, were they Christian Scientists?
"Mrs. Faustin, I don't want to alarm you but he's very ill and needs help."
"Ill?" The woman made a spitting noise. "He is fried crispy like bacon, no? All there is to do for him is for you to feed him, then let him rest, then feed him again. Bring others to feed if you can, the more the better."
"Feed him what?"
That question set off a whole barrage of Russian invective. A man's voice asked a question in the background and Mrs. Faustin exchanged some rapid-fire comments with him, all in Russian, before she came back. "He's not told you."
"Told me what?"
"Have you not made with the nookie yet?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"And he takes little of your blood and you like very much?"
"What?"
"Girlie—Yelena—future daughter of my heart—give him your blood to make him well. I beg you this as his mother."
Maybe this was a nightmare. Maybe she'd wake up pretty soon. That would be nice. "I don't understand you, Mrs. Faustin."
"Help is coming to you, but you must help now. Open your veins. Send your blood down his throat."
"What kind of crazy—? What good would that do?"
"Everything. We are vampire."
Mrs. Faustin pronounced vampire like vham-peer. She went on, something about species variation, superstition and hemophilia, but Helena's mind locked on vampire. He was so desperate to get out of the house before six. Before sunrise. And his refusal to see her before five. Sunset. But no. That was absurd. If Alex was a vampire, Scully was a werewolf.
Mrs. Faustin rattled on. She was crazy. Like her son. It was time to call an ambulance. She could only look at Alex's seared face out of the corner of her eye. Otherwise she'd throw up again. Now her furtive glances told her he had gone still as death.
Worried, she touched his shoulder. He screamed in pain, flopped away from her and screamed again.
Mrs. Faustin shouted, "What are you doing to my boy? Feed him!"
"I'm not going to do that."
"You can and you will. If you do not, I will come out there and flay you alive and then you will know the meaning of suffering. I will rip out your liver. I will lay the curse of the House Faustin—"
There was a clatter and another voice came on the phone. It reminded her of Alex's, but was deeper and rougher. It made no introductions, just began to give instruction. "This you will do or my son will die, and none of us want that. Yes, Helena? Find the sharpest blade in the house, a razor blade, perhaps, and sterilize it with flame or alcohol…" He went on, his voice inherently soothing. Helena's mind became clear and calm and she did as she was told.
Kneeling beside Alex, she poked at her left wrist with an X-Acto blade. It hurt. A lot. And it didn't bleed. Wincing through her tears, she made a proper cut across a blue vein. This time the blood welled up and she turned her wrist over and sent the drops down to Alex's lips. His tongue stretched out and caught the drops like he was catching snowflakes. She brought her wrist over his mouth, carefully, because his lips were purple and blistered, and he suckled at it instinctively, half conscious. It didn't hurt.
He was a vampire. A vampire.
Even with the truth sucking on her wrist it didn't make any sense at all. She looked at the X-Acto knife on the ground. It didn't make sense that she'd been brave enough to cut herself either. None of this made sense. How'd he get so burned, anyway?
Suddenly he grabbed hold of her wrist with both hands and tore into her flesh like a pit bull. It hurt, but the adrenalin shot through her too—fight or flight like she'd never experienced. She fought for her life, silently, desperately, kicking at his ruined flesh, trying to pull away from his vice-like jaws. But it made no difference. With amazing strength he flipped her on her back, threw himself over her body and began to suck in earnest. The edges of her vision clouded black as the blood left her body. The room went dark, but her hearing worked until the end. The last sound she he
ard was the wet, slurping sound of him eating her alive.
Chapter 5
When she woke, she was still on the basement floor, but she was cozy and warm. A pillow was under her head, the quilt off her bed around her. The first thing she did was look at her arm. There wasn't a mark on it. She bolted up out of the blanket. Where was Alex?
"You'll be lightheaded." It was a stranger's voice, deep and resonant. It may have been a warning, or a command, for the moment he said it the room began to spin in giddy loops. Helena dropped back to the pillow and the room stopped moving. Carefully she rolled toward the voice and found a man with long blond hair cradling Alex in his lap. For a confused moment she thought he was an angel because he was too chiseled, too pale, too unearthly beautiful to be human. His black T-shirt was hiked up, his breast sliced open, and in a grotesque parody of nursing, the charred thing that used to be Alex lapped at the cut with a long, pointed tongue.
"Am I dead?"
The man lifted his head. His cool blue eyes were sad. Not momentarily sad, but habitually sad. There was a difference. He appraised her in a single glance, a knowing glance that was not exactly cruel, but so calculating and distant that she realized he couldn't be human. It was like having a staring contest with a big cat at the zoo. "Alex would not kill you to save himself." The angel man looked back down at Alex. "He's the best of all of us."
"And you are?"
"His brother, Mikhail." He pointed his chin at a glass beside her. "Drink your orange juice."
I'm having a psychotic break. This is what it's like.
No wonder crazy people never thought they were nuts. Everything was normal. It wasn't like the houseplants were talking to her. She just happened to have vampires in her basement.
Mikhail had taken over caring for Alex and asked for little from her. No one asked her to feed Alex again, and she hadn't volunteered. Mikhail—Misha, Alex called him—went in and out a lot. Helena figured he was going out and sucking on other people and bringing their blood home to Alex like a sinister mama bird. She tried not to think about it. Don't ask, don't tell.
That first night, Mikhail explained how Alex came to be burned and assured her he would recover from it in time, but he was closed mouthed about vampirism in general. He said she should talk to Alex about these things. Mikhail was a little scary. Not that he wasn't always perfectly polite, but it was he, not Alex, that made her believe in vampires. Or rather, vham-peers. Mikhail pronounced it that way too.
Helena puzzled on the differences between the two brothers. Mikhail was slick, precise, icy and startlingly beautiful while Alex was impulsive, warm, impatient and had been handsome in a more normal way. They did look a little alike—same chin and mouth, same ears, same hands. That was about it. Mikhail carried Alex as easily as he would a child, and moved with a flowing grace that was borderline creepy. Helena had to assume that Alex was that strong and could move like that too if he wanted. But somehow Alex passed for human while his brother did not.
Whenever Mikhail left, Alex began to howl in pain or hunger. She didn't know which. Working on a strict need-to-know basis, that was her. Unable to help him with either problem, she hid. She ran miles every day, more than she had in a long time. When she couldn't run anymore she came home and cleaned. She was working on organizing the garage. It was cold, but it had to be done. If she worked hard enough, maybe she could sleep.
All she wanted was for them to leave. She wanted her old life back.
She wouldn't call the police, because if they got Alex, he'd die. And if Mikhail got the police… Well, best not to hypothesize.
And that was all assuming they existed. What if she called the police about the vampire infestation in her basement and it turned out no one was down there?
Over and over again she picked up the phone to call Lacey, but always put it back down again. Confessing to Lacey might prove she was crazy after all, and she didn't want that. And if this was all real, why did she need to subject Lacey to the truth? None of it was anything she ever wanted to know. It confused everything. If vampires existed, what other movie monsters were walking around out there? And what did this say about man's place in the world? About God?
Research kept her sane. When the outside world made no sense there was a lot of comfort in book facts. When she was too tired to run or clean anymore, she researched vampires.
Not even sure where to begin, she waded through everything from dense literary criticism to web posts from Goth kids with names like vlad666. Having never been a horror fan, she didn't know anything about vampires beyond the basic Count Chocula stuff. Bats, coffins, swirling capes. None of that sounded much like Alex. Nothing she'd read mentioned vampires with pushy mothers. They weren't supposed to have mothers.
On the third night, Mikhail went out and Alex did not howl. Little as she wanted to see him up close, she became increasingly worried that something was wrong with him. So after an hour or so she mustered up the courage to go check on him.
She found him lucid and sitting up. He looked better, relatively speaking. Most of the bubbly stuff had sloughed off his face and hands, leaving him looking skinned more than anything else—like one of those anatomical models from science class. After an awkward moment of silence he started to talk, hesitantly at first, and then faster and faster. His voice was raspy and the words slightly slurred.
"I was trying to think of the right way to tell you, but I kept putting it off. I let it come between us, I let it hurt you, all because I was too cowardly to lay it out from the very start. I wanted you to learn to like me—a lot—before I told you the truth. But when I was lying in that pit not knowing if I'd live out the day, I was so sorry. Sorry for the way I'd left things with you. I knew you'd hate me, think I left you, think I broke my word."
Out of breath, he stopped to wheeze. He sat cross-legged on a sleeping bag. They'd commandeered her camping gear. Another bag was unzipped and wrapped around his shoulders. She didn't think he had anything on under there—how could he? His hands looked like raw meat. He kept them still and spread open on his knees. She thought she might see the white of his knuckle bones poking through the stringy flesh and averted her eyes.
"I have questions."
"I bet." He looked up at her, his neck craned awkwardly, waiting.
Helena averted her eyes again. She'd feel better if she had a pad in her hand, or better, a digital recorder. It would be so much easier to see him as a documentary subject than as a lover. She didn't even know where to start with the questions, so just threw out the first thing that came to her.
"Are you dead?"
A wheeze came from him that might have been a laugh. "Almost." He lifted one of his ghastly hands from his knee in a stiff, apologetic gesture. She didn't know if she was looking at a tragedy or just seeing the monster he really was beneath it all. For someone to be so burned yet so…animated. It was plain wrong.
"I'm not dead. We're not ghouls. Just a different species."
"A humanoid species no one knows about?"
"No one wants to know about us. We're your shadow."
Helena folded her arms, very skeptical. "And this marriage thing. That wasn't a lie?"
"No." He said it again, lower. "No."
"Why don't you marry a woman of your own kind?"
Alex's voice went cold and formal. She'd offended him, but she didn't much care. "My mother's first priority was identifying my soul mate, regardless of species."
"That doesn't make sense. What with the hours and the taped-up windows and the…eating. I mean, it must be awkward to keep a mixed household. I don't understand how it's done."
His distant, formal tone continued. "That's not a problem, because it usually doesn't remain a 'mixed household' for long."
It took a moment for that to sink in. When it did, her stomach twisted. "Oh jeez. Oh crap. You wouldn't."
"Only when you asked. We'd have to if we wanted children."
Helena leaned back against the cold, cement wall. "You can really
do that? Oh my God." She could be like them? As much as she tried to repress it, she remembered Alex tearing into her like an animal. Felt it.
Never. She'd never do it.
"You should sit."
"I don't want to!" She pushed off the wall and began to pace the narrow, low-ceilinged room. It smelled bad down there. A combination of damp concrete and sick, unwashed vampire.
"And how old are you?"
"Twenty-seven."
She'd expected him to say two-hundred and fifty or something. The shock made her stop pacing. "But you're just a baby."
"Why, how old are you?"
"Thirty-one. Thirty-two, I mean."
"So? That's no big deal."
"That's a significant difference." She'd always dated men at least five years older than her. "Why would someone your age even want to get married?"
"I've always wanted to be married. My brothers used to laugh at me about it. Then Gregor got married and decided it wasn't so bad after all. And Mikhail, well, he just stopped laughing altogether."
Helena stopped pacing and sat on her heels about ten feet away from him. That was about as close as was comfortable. He confused her. He really did. She rubbed her face and tried to think clearly—without success.
"What is it with Mikhail anyway?"
Alex cricked his neck in her direction. "What do you mean?"
"You're brothers but you don't look much alike."
"He takes after my father. Me and Gregor look like Ma."
"No, I mean, he looks more vampire-y than you—than you used to."
"That's a long story. Mikhail is Knyaz. Our leader. Pop was, but he stepped down last year and Mikhail is first born. Being Knyaz makes him more…more like what you see, but Mikhail has always been like that in some ways. He's been preparing for this all his life."
"He's the head of your family, you mean?"
"Pop is still head of our family, but Misha has taken over what I guess you'd call the family business."
Helena looked at him expectantly. He was dancing around something, so she just waited until he spit it out.