“Don’t watch me.”
“Okay.”
He turns away until I’ve drained it and takes it, and leads me down the hall. He tosses the empty bag into a garbage can at the top of the stairs and leads me down a grand staircase into a huge formal parlor. This a big house. Not rich-big, but it was built by somebody with some money.
I look around and feel a stir, like echoes of a conversation I can’t quite hear. There’s a grand piano, a wall of pictures, and antique furniture. I run my hands over the wood on the back of a chaise lounge. My fingers naturally find a worn place, like I’d done this before.
“Come on.”
He tugs my hand and opens the front door. The moonlight spills through and I look up at the sky and stop.
There’s so many stars. We must be out in the country. Light spills across the whole sky in a stunning profusion that I can barely believe, the only competition the light of the moon itself. All around it’s dark. The house is surrounded by woods. As my eyes adjust the world comes alive in silver hues. I haven’t been out in the real dark for a long time. In cities, the only difference between the night and day is the color of the sky and the depth of shadows in alleys.
Another tug and I start walking. My hand swings, holding his. It feels so natural, his skin is so soft. It must be cold. There’s color in his cheeks and a puff of mist in front of his nose every time he breathes.
Not mine, though.
I don’t breathe. I’m a corpse.
As I walk I realize I’m not paying attention to the winding path of worn stones that leads away from the house towards the woods. It’s like my legs know the way. It must be winter, now. There’s a dusting of snow here and there. I feel strange as I walk, something moving and swirling in my stomach. There’s something about the blood I swallowed. He’s still holding my hand. He stops and looks down at me and I look back up at him.
He smoothes my hair over my shoulder and I freeze. The moon is at his back, and the stars.
He burned me. He put this thing on my neck, but he looks so kind.
“Are you alright?”
I shake my head. “No. Where does the blood come from?”
“What blood?”
I scowl at him. Something in my expression amuses him. He cracks a smile, just a little.
“It’s just blood. Nobody died to give it to me.”
He’s lying to me. I know he is, but when I look in his eyes I get nothing, just a kind of buzz. He’s keeping me out.
We keep walking. Into the woods. I’m not afraid. He isn’t either. I can see it in the way he walks.
“What happened to your friend was not your fault.”
I stop and pull my hand out of his. I think about running and the collar squeezes my neck. I push that thought out of my head.
“You weren’t there,” I say, softly, staring down at the frozen leaves coating the stones. “I saw her face as I was killing her. Like she wanted to know why I was doing this to her.”
He puts his arm around my shoulders. I just stand there.
“I’m sure she was confused, and very scared, but there was love between you. Monsters like Vincent hate love. It frightens and confuses them.”
“Why?”
“Love is a kind of magic,” he says, pulling his arm from my shoulder as he looks me in the eye. “Some say the most powerful kind. It may seem like hate and fear rule the world, but it was love that made it, love that keeps it going around.”
“All you need is love,” I say, and laugh softly to myself.
There it is again. Echoes of something just out of my hearing.
“I didn’t get to ask my question,” I say. “I told you about my first kill. I get to ask something now.”
“Go on.”
I take a deep but unnecessary breath. Old habits die hard.
“What happened to Andi after she died?”
“You’re asking me if there’s an afterlife.”
“My mother said…” I trail off, freezing in place, eyes wide and fixed on nothing.
My mother said all good girls go to heaven.
There it is. I can feel her, but I can’t see her. I know there was a soft touch once, a pair of strong gentle arms that wrapped around me when I was scared or sad, hands that fixed my lunch and bandaged my scraps and brushed my hair, but the knowledge is empty and hollow, like the papery touch of an old wasps’s nest. There’s nothing inside it. No face, no name. No sound of her voice or color of her eyes or hair.
I had a mother, once. Most people do. That’s all I’ve got.
“Christine?”
“It’s nothing. Answer my question.”
“The afterlife.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never been there.”
“If there are vampires,” I say, walking to take my mind off that hollow feeling, “what about other things? Ghosts? If there’s ghosts there must be an afterlife, right?”
“There is something in us that is more than our flesh,” he says. “We’re more than just our bodies. Where we go after that, I don’t know. I hope it’s someplace good.”
“It’s not,” I say. “It’s like when I’m sleeping. There’s just nothing. Or worse. I don’t even know if I want there to be something after. I can’t think of anything worse than seeing her again, after… after what I did.”
“Do you remember her?”
I stop in mid step and look up at the sky.
“I remember pieces. Flashes of things from before, enough to know who she was. I remember sitting next to her in fourth grade. I remember when she told me she went on her first date and when she called me to tell me her parents were getting a divorce, but it’s like seeing it through a glass. I can more feel it than see it.”
“That’s a start. More will come to you.”
“Is this you? Is it magic?”
“Partly,” he says. “We need to get back to the house.”
As we start the walk back, I look over at him. He’s not looking at me now, but staring down at the ground in thought.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“First you almost kill me. Then you put me in that room and start playing the interview game with me and making me remember things. Why?”
“You need to remember.”
“That’s not what I’m asking. Why are you interested in me? Who am I to you?”
He stumbles and his breath catches. I can feel him tense up. He takes a few rapid steps away from me and looks off into the woods, facing away. From the mist I can see he’s breathing hard. The wind catches it and carries it off until it fades into nothing. In his pockets, his fists are clenched.
Part of me wakes up for a moment. A distant part I’ve forgotten, but it’s the part that knows when a man is looking at you that way. He’s clenching his fists because if he doesn’t he’ll throw his arms around me. I don’t need to read his mind to see that.
That same part of me wants to. It might feel like going home.
He turns away.
“I want to tell you, but I can’t. You’re not ready. It would ruin everything.”
“Why?”
“I need you to trust me.”
“Why should I? You shot me in the back with that thing, and the sun. That hurt. Do you know what it feels like to choke on your own ash?”
He looks at me and then looks at the ground.
“I’m doing this for a reason, Christine. It will all make sense. We can’t stop now. We’ve gone too far. There’s further to go, but when we make it you’ll understand.”
“Just leave me alone.”
He sighs.
“As you wish.”
I press my lips shut and start towards the house. He follows a few steps behind, not speaking. Like a good pet, I head right up to my room and he closes the door without following me inside. I open the wardrobe and I feel an urge to tear it all out and shred it with my bare hands, just ruin everything. These aren’t my clothes. They’re
someone else’s, not mine. I take the bag with the prom dress and I hold it in my fists and get ready to shred it in my fingers, and stop.
I can’t do it.
I drift back to the bed. I flop down and wait for it.
Day comes. I can feel it outside, feel the sun rising to steal my soul back for another day, and then I’m gone.
When I wake up there’s a cooler sitting on the bedside table, but that’s not what catches my attention first. There’s a warm spot on the bed next to me.
Like someone was lying there.
With a shudder I get up, and open the cooler. I’m so worried about the blood I don’t notice until I’ve halfway finished gulping down the frigid gore and trying not to choke. The bookcase is packed full of volumes, wedged in tightly together like bricks without mortar. The dresser, whose top was formerly empty, now holds a television and a blu-ray player sitting next to it. I look around the room and the only sign of him I find is a folded piece of notebook paper.
Rest tonight. We will resume tomorrow.
Rest. How can I rest? I rush to the books and look them over. A stir of distant voices flutters in the back of my mind when I look over the spines. I know these books. One in particular catches my eye. The Lord of the Rings. I pull the book off the shelf, out of its slipcase. The cover is green leather, the front cover Tolkien’s own illustration of the One Ring in gilt. I can’t help but run my fingers over the buttery smooth leather. It feels like a crime to open it and bend the spine.
I almost drop the book.
There’s writing on inside cover.
For your eighteenth birthday. Love, Mom.
I sit down, and I read. I sit in the chair for hours, luxuriating in the words, feeling the pages against my skin as I turn them. I’m smiling in spite of myself, breathing in the loamy smell of Middle Earth as the words paint pictures in my mind of pastoral vistas, sinister wraiths and wizened wizards. Then I hear that voice again. Not his. It’s a recording, a song.
I put the book aside, careful to mark my page with the note, and get up.
When I put my ear to the door, I hear it more clearly.
Elvis?
That should mean something. I can feel it. I just don’t know it.
Chapter Eight
I look around and immediately know that this is wrong.
I’m not in the bedroom anymore. I’m not even in the house. My bare feet slap on tile as I walk down a wide hallway, under an arched ceiling. To either side, the walls are lined with lockers, stretching on to infinity, broken only by tall classroom doors. My movements are slow, my steps are heavy. I know this place. The chilly air. The smell of chalk and sawdust and cheap disinfectant from the floor, the wafting scents of hot dogs and canned ravioli from a cafeteria I can’t see.
There’s a weight in my arms and when I look down I’m carrying an armload of books pressed against my chest. I’m not barefoot any more. I’m wearing Mary Janes, stockings, a tartan skirt and sweater, the whole getup. Barettes hold my hair in place and there’s a pair of thick glasses perched on my nose, skewed to one side. There’s more books in the bag hanging from my back but they’re not schoolbooks. I carry those in my arms because I have to keep a battered paperback copy of Elric: The Stealer of Souls and the Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition Dungeon Master’s Manual in my pack. Keep them secret. Keep them safe.
Down the hall there’s a boy standing at a locker. His face is hidden behind the open door as he rummages inside. He’s wearing the male counterpart to my uniform, a jacket and slacks and scuffed dress shoes he’s worn too long, unable to replace them.
I see a flash of dirty blonde hair, spot a dimple in his ear from an earring when he’s not at school, or around his father. He swings the door shut and turns away from me and heads down the hall, books tucked under his arm, walking with the swaggering gait of a cocky high school football player, but there’s this month’s issue of The Amazing Spider-Man folded in half and tucked in his back pocket, a badge worn with a brusque defiance.
I go to call his name. I know it. It’s etched in my soul, but the word will not come to my mind. The shape of it will not form of my lips, lips that have felt his touch. He won’t turn to face me. I break into a run, my heels clicking on the floor, for every step he takes I take five and I still can’t catch up.
I can feel his name, like something I swallowed stuck in my throat. There’s something down there holding it, keeping it from me, something skittery and hairy, holding it in sharp little legs like clawed fingers. When I scream the name nothing but a choked cough comes out and sharp spines rake my throat.
Something rattles behind me. I look back and all the lights are off. The tiles are broken, cracked, torn out of place. The lockers are coated in rust and filth, the doors hanging skewed from their hinges. Water drips from the arched ceiling and the classroom doors lie on the floor, the glass broken out. The rattle comes again, something between breath and laughter without life or mirth, and I see the shape in the dark.
So I run, but the world in front of me has changed, too. The boy with the dirty blonde hair is gone, and so are my shoes and my books and my clothes. The tiles tear at my feet, the cold air presses against my skin and sucks the energy out of my muscles. I hear it coming behind me, taking five steps for every one of mine and gaining on me. I can feel her cold breath on my neck as I press against the wall, shivering and whimpering, praying for help, but no help is coming.
Then I see her. She has no eyes, only dull empty sockets. The side of her head is a bruise, and her sallow skin is twisted into a look of shock and horror that doesn’t shift when she closes the ruins of her throat to speak in an agonized rasp.
“What about me?”
Then I wake up.
I bolt upright in the bed, screaming at the top of my lungs, and throw myself out of it into the floor. I’m back in the bedroom and I land on the floor with a thump and skitter away from the bed on my hand and heels. Rising, I rush for the door but it flies open before I can reach it and I fall back.
He rushes in and slams the door behind him. He takes me up in his arms, pulling me to his chest and I bury my face against him, weeping blood. He runs his hands through my hair. For a bare moment I’m still in the dream. I can still feel. His fingertips on my scalp, his body expanding against me as he breathes, even the beat of his heart. My body moves and I run my lips over his throat, not to bite but to taste his skin.
Then it’s over and I shove him away, hugging myself.
“What happened? What the hell was that?”
“You had a dream,” he says.
“I don’t dream.”
“Apparently, you do.”
I look at him, in the eye. Still nothing.
“What are you doing to me?”
“Tell me about the dream.”
“What are you, my psychologist?”
“Sort of. Tell me about it.”
“Why should it?”
“Quid pro quo. Yes or no. I know something you’ll want to hear.”
With a huff, I drop down on the bed. He scoots up the chair and opens his notebook on his lap, holding his pen, but I never see him write as I tell him about the dream. He listens intently. When I describe the boy in the hallway he shudders and looks away from me like he knows something. When I tell him the rest he frowns.
“Have you ever had a nightmare before?”
“No. When I sleep it’s just like a switch, lights off.”
He leans back in the chair and scratches his chin. I watch his hand as his fingers itch at his skin, scraping over the fine stubble there, and when I realize I’m staring I look away, but he doesn’t. He cracks a smile.
I smile too, but I forget why before I even know and the smile fades from my dead bloodless lips.
“I told you. Now, what were you going to tell me?”
“Lie down.”
“Why…” I trail off. With a huff, I lie down and defensively cross my arms over my chest, and stare at the ceiling.
“What do you know about souls?” he says.
I glance over at him.
“Only that I didn’t know what it felt like to have one until it wasn’t there anymore.”
“It’s more complicated than that. When a vampire feeds, they take part of their victim’s soul.”
“So the soul is in the blood?”
“The soul is the blood. Yet it isn’t. The blood is a symbol and the thing itself at the same time. It’s complicated.”
“So,” she said, “you take people’s souls. And you’ve been feeding me somebody’s souls when you give me that blood.”
“Not exactly,” he said. “When you go to the blood bank and give blood, what happens?”
I shrug. “I think they revoked my membership.”
He laughs a little, bitterly. I can barely hear it. He rubs at his face to hide his smile.
“Humor me. When a person gives blood, what happens?”
“I don’t know. They put in a bag.”
“They take some out. It grows back. Souls do the same thing. You can take part of it and the part you took grows back. That’s where people come from. Two souls give up pieces to make a seed that grows into a third.”
I blink a few times. “So we’re all the same soul in different bodies,” I say.
“No more than all the species of a tree are the same tree because they came from seeds of other trees,” he says. “The same, different. Anyway, people these days are careless with their souls. They rip pieces off and throw them into the void and give them away to strangers and treat them like crap, because they don’t believe they have them anymore.”
“Very poetic,” I sigh.
“The nosferatu is different. All feedings are fatal, the victim’s soul…”
“Gets eaten?”
“Maybe. I like to think part of it does but there’s too much and some of it escapes. I mean, you know this better than I do, but when the undead rips open somebody’s neck, they never get all the blood. Something definitely goes to the nosferatu, though.”
“What about,” I swallow, “My soul?”
He looks away.
“When a vampire is created, a human being’s soul is bonded with an… entity. When he bit you he fed you some of his own blood. That gave you the strength to survive your own death. He put something in you and it grew by feeding on your soul, but you are what you eat. It became your soul, sort of. It’s complicated.”
Thrall (A Vampire Romance) Page 7