by Various
“I have to go.” I stepped out of his bedroom, focusing my eyes on his exposed skin for every place a vein could be. I wanted to take him, to feast on his soul and feel his life drain into my own. I needed to feed.
“Hey, no!” he shouted, obviously realizing I was on my way out.
“I’ll try to come back...” The front door was just behind me. I turned the lock with my mind, then the handle with my hand before I raced out. Behind me, Tommy followed, his voice echoing in the corridor. I took the stairs two at a time.
Outside, the night air bathed me in its cool touch, easing my hunger pains somewhat. People crowded along the sidewalks and in cars up and down the street. The park bustled as well. Everywhere I looked I saw someone I wanted to take hold of and drag into a dark place.
“Angela!” Tommy came up behind me. “What’s wrong?”
I faced him, tears pooling in my eyes. There were lights over the entry to his apartment building. I know he saw my tears and the ghastly color of them. He paused there, looking both frightened and sympathetic. He held his hand out to me.
I shook my head. “I can’t,” I cried. “I want to, but I can’t do that to you.” Backing further, I turned and sprinted along Main Street. I ducked into an alley, tore away my blouse and took to the air. I flew from the city, from the hope I wanted to cleave to, and returned to the only place I could think of.
Rory’s estate greeted me in the same manner it always had. I alighted on the roof where I last saw my guardian alive and climbed down the steps to the back yard and the vast gardens beyond. Hugging myself, I sat beside the place where Rory had fallen and wept. There were no remains of him now, all the ash blown away in the wind over the weeks I’d been gone.
Remembering my nightmare and the way Rory always used to stare at the fountain in the gardens, I mimicked his gaze and watched the water trickling over old marble. The shapely carving in its midst looked familiar now, like an old spirit I once knew but had long forgotten the name of. When the moon peered down at me from the bloody sky, I rose to get a closer look at the fountain.
A bat made faint chirruping sounds somewhere near me. I looked up to see it chasing moths near the lamp post. At the fountain’s edge, I stopped and tried to see the statue better. Water ran over every smooth surface, clear and clean. Near the base of the statue, just beneath the water’s surface, I read the name engraved there. “Karada.”
Chills swept through me.
A voice tickled the back of my mind. “Karada.”
Spinning around, I saw no one, and yet I knew I was not alone on the property. Someone else must be near; at least close enough to send her thoughts into mine. Leaving Tommy so abruptly tormented me. The sky darkened, a stain of red unbearable for me to look upon. Even the moon took on the unholy shade. I needed to feed, and feed I would.
The nearest home lay ten miles to the east, but it was not human blood I would thieve. I took to the sky, leaving the mystery behind me for the time being. The river called my name. There I went to seek out some unfortunate animal and sate the ache I suffered. Opossums found their end at my hand that night. I felt ridiculous and wild as I feasted on them. The thrill of the hunt did not rise for me. I hated the low of feeding on vermin.
For a week I didn’t call Tommy. I rifled through the papers of Rory Archibald, known the world over in the art scene as a high-ticket buyer of obscure pieces depicting the American slave trade. Why he obsessed over such a subject I could not guess at the time, but I had an idea it might be related to this Karada person or thing recurring in my dreams.
In Rory’s office, at the bottom of a file drawer, I found a piece to the puzzle. An old, worn leather diary, the pages tattered and feathered on the edges. Opening it, I delved into my dead guardian’s past and wondered at his half-mad musings.
October 1840
She came to me this night again. I thought her a dream, her hair so long and silken against my chest, her lips divine, her sharp teeth digging past my skin. Sweet Karada, how I love you. I cannot push away your essence no more your heart, despite the wrong of it.
The others laugh at me, James and Stephen. They say I’m ill and it cannot be helped. I will die within the year. The agony only being I will not see my lover again after that. Maybe in the afterlife we will find one another, for here there is no future for us.
I flipped ahead, past similar entries of laments and sorrow, longing and lust. I paused to read over an entry where the script became blurred by water damage.
April 1841
Now I understand the nature of her. God has sent this divine beauty to me to relieve me of this burden I carry. He has asked me to do these things, that I kill those who would stop my lover’s seed from spreading. They would kill her and cut off her head. They would do the same to me if I let her take me. They must not know. And so I will secret this journal away, my link to who and what I was. The voices tell me to do so many terrible things. I need them to stop now. I need to know her warmth, to bury myself in her heaven and forget all this darkness and death. Karada will have me. I must share her, true, but I will forever be her angel of death.
The pages after that were blank.
I searched through the rest of Rory’s files. Most held lists of art either purchased or to be bought. I found strange records of family trees with no last names. Beneath the bed in the master bedroom, I found something else.
A specially made box, metal, perhaps fireproof, rested there. Tracing the lock with my finger, I moved it with my mind. When it opened and I lifted the lid, a wrapped parcel waited inside. “What’s this?” I wondered aloud.
I stripped away the brown parchment and stared down at the woman’s face, captured in oils so long ago, the eighteen hundreds to be exact. The artist, R. Archibald, had dated his work. She wore only a swathe of bold orange fabric that hid nothing of her nakedness, surely a racy piece of art for its time. But that’s not what bothered me. The woman, her skin dark and smooth, her face narrow and her eyes alight with blue sparkles looked very much like me.
At the center of the bottom frame, an engraved placard spelled out her name. I didn’t need to read it to know. Karada, perhaps Rory’s first love, stared back at me in her immortalized painting, and I knew my meeting with the vampire was not a thing of coincidence at all.
He had chosen me, watched me grow, and in his own way, raised me to replace this love he had lost. I can’t guess how old Rory had been, but if he had been in his twenties when this Karada turned him, he would have been well over a hundred years in age. I shuddered at the thought. Would I live so long? Could I? And more important, did I want to? I knew I didn’t have the strength to do it alone. But how could I bring another into my hell and expect forgiveness or understanding?
Chapter Ten
The Grave
I called Tommy the next night, fearing he’d hang up on me. “I’m sick,” I explained, making excuses for why I’d left. “It’s a blood disease. No, it’s not contagious. It’s hereditary from my father’s side. Yes, yes, I want to see you again, but I don’t want to hurt you. I’m so afraid I’ll hurt you.” My words were as close to the truth as I dared get.
“Why did you leave?”
I glanced around the bedroom, and my gaze fell on a triad of prescription bottles by Rory’s framed pictures. I lied. “I forgot my medicine.”
“Geez, Angela, you could have told me that then. I’ve been worried about you all week. I don’t even have a number for you.”
I gave him the number to the mansion. He seemed to calm down a little. “I’m no good for you, Tommy. What we had was just starting back in school before I left. It’s not like we really know each other.”
He sighed, sounding impatient. “Don’t you want to get to know me?”
I sniffed back a tear. “Yes, of course I do. You’re all I’ve ever wanted.”
There was silence on the other end while he thought over what to say next. I stared at the painting of Karada which hung now near the bed. She stared right
back at me with eyes the same as mine.
“Okay. Okay then. Friday, are you busy?”
“No,” I stood and paced, nervous, afraid I’d mess this up again.
“Dinner and a movie?”
“It’s not too cliché?”
“It’s a start, Angela. That’s all I’m asking for.”
“All right. It’s a date. I’ll try my best not to...”
“Not to get spooked. You were scared that night. I don’t know why. No clue what I said or did.”
“It’s not you. It’s me.”
He laughed. “Now that’s a cliché line.”
We talked a while more, mostly about his work on the new city park recreation center. Then we said our good-byes, and he told me he loved me. I couldn’t say it back, no matter how much I felt for him. What is love to a wretch like me, a creature that subsists on the blood of the living like some leech? “I’ll see you Friday,” I said and hung up.
“What do you think, Karada?” I asked the painting. She said nothing, regarding me as she had her painter so many years long before, with an expression of knowing mirth. I wondered what their relationship entailed and how it had ended.
I went for a walk in the evening. Two more days until my date with Tommy in which I wanted to make a plan to get us to work. Somehow, there had to be a way. I imagined telling him what I had become, made up all sorts of reactions and explanations. I had darker thoughts, well-thought-out scenarios in which I turned him into a vampire and we lived out eternity together. Could he love me enough for such a dream? I doubted so.
Crickets chirped out their night songs near the flagstone path. I strolled along through the winding garden past trees and intricate plantings. Flowers bloomed here and there, their perfume lingering to make the walk more pleasant. I had not eaten since the opossums in the woods, and I did not hunger yet for the taste of blood.
Pausing by a small, stone building, I realized I had not walked so far into Rory’s Garden of Eden before now. The crickets were silent here. The blue-black sky barely bore a faint tinge of pink. I vowed to pay attention to my hunger this time and to use the sky as my guide in order to know how long it took before my need became unbearable.
“Lockets and trinkets, he used to bring…” A strange voice sang on the wind.
I tensed. Seeking the source, I looked over where I was, better taking in the details. The structure near me was a mausoleum of sorts. Angelic carvings in relief decorated the marble walls, vines knotting over their faces and wings.
“Hello?” I called. No one should be in the garden at this hour. The usual housekeepers and groundskeepers were not due for another seven days. “Who’s out here?”
Laughter echoed from a stretch of trees. It bubbled and danced in my ears. I trembled. I’d heard the same sound in my dreams. The shapely mist-colored figure of a woman passed between the tree trunks and glided away from me.
“I’m seeing things. Can’t be real. She can’t be.”
“And not a fanciful gown for his beloved...” She stopped, glanced at me, and flashed a glittering smile.
I knew the shape of her face. “Karada?” I asked.
“Little angel, another of Rory’s toys. Now you and I are all alone.” She held out her hands to me, beckoning. I didn’t want to go to her, fearful of a mind-hold as Rory had forced on me. If he had such powers, then surely she did as well. “Come,” she urged. “Let us know each other this night. There is much to tell you.”
I shook my head.
“Angela,” she chided. “Come and hunt this night with me. We are sisters, you and I. Sisters in blood. Mine runs through yours just as it did through Rory’s. Don’t you want to know me?”
“No.”
She started forward, and the pale gown she wore caught on the high flowers. When she stepped onto the path I saw her bare feet. Stains tainted the hem of her white dress, bits of torn lace fluttered in the wind and a gory hole in the bodice over her chest caused me to shudder. Her dark skin glowed in an ethereal way. Remnants of a veil blew about her silken hair, strands of the dark mass tied at the ends with beads.
“He kept me prisoner,” she explained, nodding once at the mausoleum. “But I broke free the night he died. His mind couldn’t keep the locks in place then. I’ve bided my time, waited. Cold, wrinkled and a creature of death myself I didn’t know if I could find sustenance. I thought I might escape the stone prison only to die by the light of the sun, too weak to hunt.”
She reached me. Icy fingers traced my cheek as she smiled. Her face looked worn, not the smooth beauty in the painting by the bed, but a mask of it, wrinkled at the edges and sallow, sunken. Her lips twitched every so often, a nervous tic while she studied me.
“You’re hungry, little one, so hungry.”
“No. I won’t kill my own kind again. Never again.”
“Your kind. They are no longer your kind.” Karada licked her black lips with the tip of a pinkish-gray tongue. A fang showed itself before she spoke. “What is life without the thrill of the hunt? You will miss it too much. It will weigh on you as it did on Rory. He tried not to kill at first, to drink just enough to sustain him. But once you taste of a living human, you will want to drink away the rest of its soul. You can’t resist.”
“I can.” I began to back away, thinking her a thing worse than a vampire, maybe a cross between vampire and ghost for that’s what she looked like to me. Ethereal and otherworldly, a thing of nightmares.
Her laughter frothed in my mind. “Perhaps you will be the first to do so. Perhaps not.” She stepped toward me, her eyes flashing red for an instant, but not long enough for me to prepare. Claws extended from her hand when she struck me, slashing my face. “Perhaps,” she began as she passed me, “we will never know.”
Blood dripped down my cheek onto my T-shirt. Fury threatened to send me after her. I wanted to fight back, to cut her face as she had mine even though I felt skin stretching back into place to knit and seal my wound.
Karada began to sprint, her arms at her sides, the ruined wedding dress she wore, flapping. Chocolate-colored wings burst from her shoulders, bat-like and hideous. She rose into the night to leave me standing there, confused over what had happened and what manner of being I had encountered. I wiped at my cheek to find it healed.
The iron door of the mausoleum clanked against its hinges when the wind picked up. Clouds had moved in to threaten rain. Humidity pressed in on my skin.
My attention drawn to the door, I approached it to investigate. Inside, a few candles burned in glass vases. The walls bore jagged red-brown lines. Intrigued by them, I went in farther. Tracing a finger of a set, I understood. They were the exact size and pattern nails would make if someone tried to scrape her fingers over the stone. The color meant Karada had scraped her fingernails past skin, bleeding with each futile attempt to escape.
At the rear of the small room another door enticed me. I went, a lamb willing and curious. Behind it I found Karada’s open coffin. All around the casket, vases of dead flowers decorated the grim scene. Scattered over the floor were pieces of paper, most so damaged by moisture that they’d fallen apart over time. I knelt, retrieving one spattered with drops of red-brown—blood.
Rory’s slanted script spanned the slip of ruined paper, the words faded.
A chill passed over my heart.
In my mind, a scene unfolded. He had come to her grave, this very place and had pushed back the lid of a different coffin. Beneath it, the bride rested on silken pillows, her eyes closed, her hands crossed on her chest. Her neck however, was no longer attached to her body, and some superstitious fool had driven a stake through her chest where old blood stained her dress.
Standing there by the light of a candle, Rory threaded a needle and whispered a prayer. He set to work, stitching her head back to her body.
When he finished, he lifted her body from its resting place to cradle in his arms. He sang and spoke, willing her to wake. When she did not, he brought his wrist to his mouth a
nd drew fangs against skin to release the crimson flow. It dribbled over the makeshift stitches.
The magic in the blood worked its cure. Skin fused. Flesh knitted. Not long afterward, Karada opened her dark eyes to regard him. Her lips parted in a demon’s smile with sharpened teeth. “You are mine this night, my love. Mine now and always. My angel of death.”
I released the paper to drift back to the soiled floor, wishing I had never touched it. The love between Rory and Karada confused me. My darker side wanted such a love. Not the master-and-teacher bond I’d had with Rory, but a bond as an equal with the man I wanted, desired, and cared for.
Backing from the coffin room, I bumped into the door. Another vision swept over me.
Rory’s face appeared, snarling and demonic as he leered in on Karada between the door and its frame. “You will give your loyalty to me, woman, or remain in the darkness forever.”
She shook her head, fury and rebellion glittering in her eyes. “You belong to me, Rory Archibald, not the other way around!”
He cursed and shut the door.
In a manner of moments, time passed, days, weeks, months, years. The hunger became so intense that Karada lay weeping in the corner of the room until she could scarcely move. Bite marks blazed over her arms where she’d succumbed and tried to stave off her pain.
I jumped back from the door, severing the connection to the images. Could this be another of the gifts of my curse? How could objects hold memories of the past? Was it real or a delusion my mind created? I had only one way of knowing the truth, but the vampire who left me in the garden was not a creature I wanted to see again anytime soon. I left the mausoleum and returned to the night. The sky remained its same pink-tinged navy with stars sparkling in its midst. The silence near the gravesite lent an eerie, nightmarish aura to the grounds as I returned to the mansion.