On good days, I fed him, did the chores he wanted me to do, and we ignored each other. On bad days, he came home stinking of cheap wine, telling me he was the best thing that ever happened to me, I could have ended up dead. I wasn’t pretty enough to survive as a prostitute, much less become someone’s wife.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, my parents only had one child, but I didn’t get pregnant as fast as I thought I would. I hoped perhaps a baby, an heir, would calm him, and reduce the number of times he came home drunk with a mouthful of bile for me.
But it was nearly four years before I finally missed one menstrual cycle. Then two. Then three. I was overjoyed. I would have a child, and it would love me. Perhaps my husband would too.
I told him he finally put a baby in my womb. I patted my hand to my belly, fluttering with excitement.
He punched me, right where the baby would be.
I fell to the floor, screaming. Crying. He told me he had no intention of having a child with me. Said I was his property, not his beloved. He kicked me a few times as well, just for good measure.
I lay on the floor, weeping until my face was salt-stained. He left me there, on the ground, first eating the food I had prepared for his evening meal, and then going to bed.
I was still lying there in the morning when he went off to do some business.
Finally I got up. I put together a few things I brought from my home and I left, walking directly towards my old house. My husband assured me it had been shuttered, and was awaiting our child. I decided to take myself and my baby-to-be there since it was my child’s land.
To say I wasn’t thinking clearly doesn’t even begin to describe my emotional turmoil. I had been damaged for a long time. Now I was deranged.
When I arrived at the farm after a full day’s walking, I was shocked to discover a man there. Twenty, and well-muscled. He was tending to a garden the likes of which I had never seen. Today, they call it having a green thumb.
I walked up to him, asked him who he was and what he was doing there. He told me his name was Jacob and he owned the land. I told him that was impossible, it belonged to the child in my belly.
Jacob did something I’d never seen a man do before. He listened to me. He stood out in the field with me as the sun fell and the day turned from afternoon to twilight. He offered me food and a place to sleep for the night.
The next day, my head was slightly more clear. I knew, in the more modern vernacular, I was screwed.
I started crying again. Jacob, who didn’t deserve to be involved in my troubles at all, told me that since this was my home in the first place, I was welcome to stay. Even if my husband argued with him, Jacob had paid for the house in full.
Sure enough, that evening my husband came in search of his property. He had come home to no evening meal the night before, and it hadn’t taken him long to figure out where I was. Threats were made, all of which Jacob countered. My husband was large and burly, but Jacob was clearly capable of taking care of himself. In the end, my husband accepted a small sum of money to walk away and never return.
I became a servant in my own home, cooking and cleaning for Jacob. It wasn’t a perfect life, to be sure, as the days passed and my belly got larger. But at least I was back in my home, and Jacob was a kind host.
I was terribly surprised when one day, he kissed me.
It wasn’t really what you would call a romantic kiss. It was an end-of-the-day kiss, when you came in from the field and wanted to connect with your spouse for a moment. It surprised us both. He said he hadn’t realized what he was doing until he did it.
That was when our relationship took a sharp turn. It was the beginning of the end for me and I didn’t even know it.
Did I love Jacob? He was a good man. Willing to take responsibility for a wife and child who weren’t his own. I think he took me in out of a sense of fairness. He was trying to make the world right, in his own small way. The rhythm of life and close quarters caused us to fall in love with each other.
For about a week, it was amazing. We started calling each other husband and wife, and for the first time, I felt like the words had meaning. We became lovers, him with no experience and me with seven months’ worth of baby in the way. We found a way to make it work.
I could tell something was troubling him. Wonder of wonders, we talked about it. He felt it wasn’t right to sleep with another man’s wife, even though he was more of a husband to me than my husband had ever been. Jacob wasn’t rich but he had some friends in the city and he was certain one of them could discreetly work out some divorce papers and a backdated marriage certificate. He would claim the child was his and tell his friend he just wanted to do the right thing.
Once we were married, he could introduce me to his family and friends, instead of keeping me hidden away in the house.
It all seemed too perfect.
We arranged to go into the city. It was several hours of walking and when we arrived there it was late afternoon. Jacob left me at an inn and told me to get something to eat, stating he would return soon and fetch me.
I told him I wanted to go with him but he said I needed to feed the baby. He didn’t know how long it would take to get papers drawn up and paid for. He would have eaten with me first but with evening coming, soon his friend’s offices would close. He wanted to be married to me as soon as possible.
I can’t blame him. He was excited, and could tell I was tired from walking all day. He wanted to be married to me so badly.
I sat and ate, and enjoyed my final meal.
As I finished my last few bites, a crowd of men entered the inn, filling up all the other tables in the place. They began to order food. All of them were in a foul mood, as they’d spent the day listening to some rabble-rousing rabbi.
Jesus.
That wasn’t the first time I’d heard his name. When I lived in the city with my husband, gossip spread from wife to wife like honey on bread. Sweet, sticky, and delicious.
I remembered thinking idly that it would be interesting to see Jesus teach. I wondered what he would say about my condition.
That was when my husband spotted me. He sprung to his feet, pointed, and screamed, “Adulteress!”
Every head turned and looked at me while my husband spewed a vile monologue about how I was pregnant with his child. How I left him for another man. And now here I was, sitting in an inn, eating my dinner like I wasn’t the vilest sinner on earth.
One of the men nearby actually said, “Is this true?” Centuries before terrible courtroom dramas made it a cliché.
I didn’t know how to defend myself. How to explain that my husband sold my land, beat me, and lied to me. That while what he said was true, it wasn’t the whole story.
What I said was, “It is.”
One of the men grabbed my arm. Another grabbed my shoulder. One stood behind me, held me by my neck. They hoisted me from my chair and marched me down to the temple.
They threw me on the ground and cried out that I had been caught in adultery. Someone added to the cacophony of voices, stating the law said I should be stoned. Various men in the group picked up rocks. They asked what should be done with me.
I looked up from the ground and there was Jesus.
The woman caught in adultery in the bible? It was me. Or rather, it is me.
That was when Jesus started to write in the dust.
What did he write? As I said, I didn’t really know how to read. Jacob taught me a little. From what I could tell, it was a list of names. My husband’s name was in there, so I assume it was the names of the men in the crowd.
After he’d written a few names down, he started writing down a list of sins next to each name. I couldn’t make most of them out but I heard a mumble from the crowd when Jesus scratched the words in the dirt. The first one next to my husband’s name was false witness, which I’m sure made some of the crowd think twice about his story.
Jesus did his whole, “Whichever one of you is without sin shoul
d cast the first stone.” Everyone dropped their rocks and went home. At least the stoners did.
You would think I’d come up with better word choice after two thousand years, but no.
Jesus said since the people didn’t condemn me, he didn’t condemn me. He told me to go forth and sin no more. I always kind of took it as a sign he thought I should marry Jacob.
I walked away from the temple. At first I thought I’d go back to the inn but I wasn’t sure where the angry mob, led by my husband, had gone. Assuming any of them were decent people, they needed to go back to pay for their meals. I started wandering the streets, asking various merchants if they’d seen Jacob. I did that until it got dark, and the merchants cleared out. Quite literally, as the last man was storing his wares, I got what I thought was a lucky break. A shopkeeper had seen my husband, and even knew the building he had gone to. I thanked the man and left.
It was my last hour as a human.
The place I headed to was perhaps a ten minute walk from the shopkeeper but the dark was descending quickly and soon I realized I forgot where he told me to turn. In the light, I knew the city reasonably well. The dark was another matter.
Finally, I gave up and decided to turn back and locate the inn at which I had eaten, reasoning that my husband would wait for me there when all else failed.
I made it back to the inn. I didn’t see Jacob there, though. I ran into my husband and all of his friends.
You see, they weren’t happy being humiliated in public like that. They decided to wait around and give me the stoning I’d skipped out on.
They went back to the inn, and ate their meals. Instead of cooling down they got more and more angry. They ordered more food and more wine. Lots more wine.
At some point, Jacob came back to the inn. The innkeeper told Jacob what happened. When Jacob confronted my husband directly, my husband claimed they left me without a scratch and I hadn’t returned to the inn. He insinuated perhaps I decided to rethink my life.
Jacob left the inn to hunt for me.
That’s what my husband told me as he and his accomplices covered my mouth, took hold of my limbs, and dragged me through the dark streets.
After a handful of minutes, I was thrown on the ground for the second time that day. We were in an alley, with walls on three sides.
I had been walking nearly all day, with seven months of child inside of me. I’d spent several hours hunting for the man I loved just short of frantically. I was done. Whatever was going to happen to me was going to happen.
What happened was I went into labor.
If there was anything merciful about that night, it was that the labor was quick. The men stuffed rags in my mouth to muffle the screaming, and a couple of them stood at the end of the alley to prevent anyone from getting too interested in what was going on. People mind their business when they think they might end up dead otherwise. There are stories about some woman crying for help in New York and no one bothering to call the police. That was two millennia before cell phones. No one was coming to help me.
A short time later, the baby came into the world. Boy or girl? I’ll never know. Did it live past those first few moments? Impossible to say. The baby was six weeks early, born in a dirt alley and wrapped in filthy rags once it was out of me. All I knew was it gave a strong-lunged scream when it came out.
My husband gave the baby to one of his cohorts with the order to take it to Jacob. He also handed the man a couple of coins and told him to give them to Jacob as well. “Tell him I’ve got what’s mine and I’m returning what’s his.”
The man ran off into the night. He was the luckiest of all of them. He probably lived to see the sunrise.
I was still lying in the dirt, rags in my mouth, covered with the slime and blood that comes with childbirth. My body was on the verge of giving up, of passing out, of letting whatever was going to happen, happen while I lay in a stupor.
The men began to pick up and feel the balance of the stones in the alley. In the fog of my mind, I wondered what it was my husband told them to make all that horribleness all right in their eyes. Or was it not that I was horrible but that they were humiliated?
These men lived in town. Their names, faces, and sins had been broadcast for all to see. While most of the people couldn’t read, enough names and sins had been read aloud that the information was going to follow them for the rest of their days.
I felt myself come up from the blackness of unconsciousness. My husband was directly in front of me, saying something about stoning me for the crime of adultery. Everyone else stood behind him, arms cocked, prepared to throw, once my makeshift death sentence had been given.
My husband stopped talking, and his arm moved from stone-holding position to stone-throwing position.
From behind the pack of men, I heard a scream, and everything went black again.
Have you ever been in the ocean? Did you ever just let the waves carry you, up and down, up and down? Like you were a cork bobbing on the surface of the water? That’s what was happening to me in the alley. Though I didn’t realize it, I was still bleeding. I’d been injured during the birth. Even as I watched one man after another getting his throat ripped open, it was impossible for me to do anything but ride the waves of consciousness. Up, a man’s neck gushed blood, and down.
Up, a man got his fingers broken as he attempted to stab a vampire with a knife, and down.
Up, and down. Up, and down. Suddenly I was up, and cresting, and my husband was the last man standing. The thing that killed all the other men was standing in front of my husband, wearing a tunic soaked in gore. By the light of the moon I saw blood dripping from the thing’s mouth.
Today, of course, you have the word vampire to describe what I saw. Back then, all we had was demon.
That was the first time I got a good, long look at the thing that would one day take the name John Smith.
My husband and John Smith stared at each other for a long, tense moment. It might have been seconds, or a minute, or an hour. It seemed to last forever.
Then my husband, the coward, stepped away from John Smith, and back behind me. Even though I was lying on the ground, on my way to death, he thought I would make an excellent human shield.
He was right, in a sense.
My husband held up his rock, waiting for John Smith to make a move. Another long moment passed.
And then John Smith made his first and only mistake.
Instead of trying to walk around me, John Smith tried to go over me, counting on his vampire balance to keep him upright. But my clothes were tangled, still pulled up around my waist. I barely twitched and the hem of my dress caught his foot. He stumbled.
My husband brought his stone down on John Smith’s head.
John Smith went to his knees. Blood oozed from a laceration across his face. It dripped off his chin. Into my mouth.
My throat was dry. I swallowed his blood.
John Smith stood up, his body already healing from the wound my husband had given him.
My husband screamed, just once, and tried to bring the rock down on John Smith’s head. Smith grabbed his arm and broke it. Just for fun, he broke my husband’s other arm.
Then he clamped down on my husband’s neck, and drank.
When he was done, Smith looked down at me. I was still bleeding. Barely a mouthful for him.
It didn’t matter. He fed on me until I died. Then he left. My body healed itself and I woke up.
I was a demon.
I didn’t know it. Not at first.
Once I was awake, I wanted to get away from the bodies around me. I was woozy and disoriented. I had no idea what was happening to me as I went through the change. I ran out of the alley. I only got a few steps into the street when the sun came up and burned my flesh.
I did what came naturally. I dove into the window of the nearest building. We didn’t have window glass in those days. Moments later, I realized I could move amazingly fast, and almost totally silent. I had, by luck
of the draw, jumped into a shop that sold cloth to rich people. I tucked myself into a trunk and spent the day hoping no one would open it. They didn’t.
The only truly unfortunate thing that happened was when it came time to evacuate my bladder and bowels I couldn’t leave the trunk. I did some pretty horrible stuff to all that expensive cloth.
Night came, and I stole a dress from the shop. I went looking for Jacob and my baby but they were both long gone.
I knew the sun burned, I was certain that even if I ran the entire way, going back to my farm was a poor idea. I was some kind of demon now, and it was doubtful I would still be Jacob’s true love.
I moved into some caves about an hour’s run from the city. I stayed there by day and came back at night. When I got thirsty, I discovered…I don’t know what to call it, really. The ability to see the weakest in the herd. I fed. I helped let people rest. I realized John Smith did what he did not because he was a demon but because he was a monster.
CHAPTER 56
“Sure, but then what?” I asked.
Emma stood, and opened the door. “I survived,” she said. “You’ll have to wait if you want to hear more stories. Meanwhile, we need to open the front door and see about getting Wash something to eat.”
As we walked out of the back room, I eyeballed all the cots, the floor, the walls…everything. It was easier than thinking about all the stuff I just learned, which, like every vampire story I’d heard up until now, told me everything and nothing at the same time.
Emma’s story was heartbreaking, to be sure. But I didn’t know that it really told me anything about John Smith. Except apparently he was a big fat drama queen.
Wash was in bad shape when we checked on him. He said he was ready to get up, to help serve the influx of people about to join us. Emma and I both told him to stay in bed, we’d handle it, and then we shut him in his secret room.
The front door opened and people entered. Because I was used to the computer system, I checked our nightly residents in while Emma handed out cleanup kits and towels.
The shelter wasn’t huge, we reached maximum capacity fairly quickly, and the officer at the door radioed in that any additional people should be sent to another shelter.
Blood Calling (The Blood Calling Series, Book 1) Page 15