Tenderly he clasped Jill’s neck, splaying his fingers up into her blood-soaked curls and lifted her just enough to tilt her head back. He pressed his spurting wrist to her lips and closed his eyes to force down the upstart of regret in the back of his mind.
When enough of his blood reached her so that Jill was partially roused, she latched onto him with her lips and began suckling hard. She swallowed convulsively and found the metallic taste oozing down her throat was intoxicating to all of her senses. She felt every part of her body become alive, humming with energy.
Then, the thrill became too much, and was too much for her to handle... Her chest rose up and she moaned, but she couldn’t stop herself from drinking. It felt as if a war was being waged under her own skin and within her own mind. She needed– wanted the drink, and the seductive taste of it, but at the same time every drink was tearing her apart. She suddenly became aware of each and every organ in her body and one by one they each turned inside out; first turning flaming hot and then freezing cold. The pain was excruciating.
Doc tried to pull his wrist away from her but she reached up a hand and clasped it to her mouth tightly. He knew her strength had returned because he had to force her to release her hold on him. He watched as she gasped and her chest heaved with breath causing her back to arch on and off the table over and over again. Remnants of his blood left a trail sliding down her cheek and to her neck.
Looking up, Doc saw Charlie standing against the wall. He peered at his friend carefully, hoping he wouldn’t see censure in the man’s eyes. All that was evident was shock and awe; Charlie never once took his gaze from Jill as she changed right in front of them.
After several long moments, Jill sighed deeply and then went limp, one arm hanging off the end of the table. Charlie heaved forward, but Doc put a hand up and motioned that he should wait. After minutes passed that felt more like hours, she opened her eyes and blinked a few times.
“What happened?” she asked, sitting straight up and casting a gaze back and forth between the two of them. “I feel different.” She raised her lip and ran her tongue along her teeth. Her eyes widened and she reached a hand to her mouth and used her fingertips to feel the pointed tips of her incisors.
And that was when something inside Doc broke. The scalpel he’d had clutched in his hand clattered to the floor, bringing both Charlie’s and Jill’s eyes to him. A shudder wracked his body and he stumbled even as he hurried to leave the room.
“Charlie?” her voice was small.
The older man forced a warm smile, then went to the sink and ran a rag under the tap, wringing it before bringing it back to her. He wiped the blood from her face with a gentle touch and took a moment to examine her back. The wound was healed over, not even a scar to mark that it had ever been there.
“Anything hurt?” he asked.
Jill shook her head, her curls bobbing, “Nothing hurts. But I fell. You and Doc came.” She frowned, her eyes cutting from side to side as she tried to remember.
“Yes, you fell. Made quite a mess. Probably I’ll need to get to that next, but I want to make sure you feel okay. You could likely do with a shower.”
She swallowed, reaching a hand to cup around her shoulder where the injury had been. Only smooth skin remained and she rubbed the area lightly. The coldness of her own skin surprised her. She felt like ice, except that she wasn’t cold in the sense that she needed to be warmed.
“I’m changed,” she murmured, her head darting up. “I’m like him now. He changed me.”
Charlie took her hand, squeezed it and smiled. “He didn’t have any choice, girlie. We were losing you. If he could have done it any other way he would have, but you’d lost too much blood.”
She snatched her hand away from him and frowned, inching back with an appalled look on her face. Waves of tremors racked her body and she struggled to slide off the examining table. She clasped the edge to hold herself straight, her entire body felt foreign to her. She didn’t know how to move her limbs. And then she realized she wasn’t breathing right either, forgetting to take in air until she gasped with need. Nothing worked as it should, the connections from her mind to the rest of her wearing thin.
She swallowed, shaking her head. “Don’t touch me, okay. Just don’t touch me.”
When somehow she was able to get her legs to respond, she wobbled from the room. The part of the hospital she’d been calling her own for the last several weeks was only about seven doors down the hall. She hoped she could make it there as she slapped her palm against the wall; step after step, edging along it for support.
“You can make it,” she chanted to herself. “You can make it. You can do this.”
Once in her room she reached down and ripped her shirt over her head. The cotton was so coated with her blood it was stiff and like hard papier-mâché. Nausea welled up in her and she snatched her bloodied pants down to her ankles, tripping over herself to get as far away from them as possible.
She turned the water hot in the shower; standing under the hard stream with her head back, her eyes closed and her mouth open. She rubbed with her tongue and felt that her teeth were normal again.
“Maybe it was a dream,” she gurgled through the streaming water. She dropped her head and watched as the water turned crimson with the blood rinsing from her blonde hair. She felt her shoulder and back again. Not a mark. Not a single mark.
Still trying to deny the truth, she clutched a bar of soap and began to scrub roughly, scratching her skin to remove all trace of stain. From the corner of her eye she spied her shaving razor on the floor of the shower.
Urgently she took it and struggled to break the plastic shield covering the tiny metal blades. With her fingernail she worked one of those blades loose and held it in her right hand a moment. She let the other pieces of the razor clatter to the floor at her feet and watched them float toward the drain, carried by the still running shower water.
Mind made up, she held out her left hand and ran the strip of blade across the inside of her palm. Feeling it slice deep into the skin she languished in the pain, a reminder she still lived. But did she? In horror she watched as the skin closed up behind the blade, only the tiniest bit of red emerging from the wound before it completely healed itself.
She leaned back against the inside of the shower and let her body slide down the tile surface until she was curled into a ball. A wail rose up in her throat as she dropped her forehead onto her knees in abject desolation. The image of her sisters’ faces flashed into her mind as she began to sob.
The pain was like nothing she could ever imagine. As the darkness surrounded her soul and it quenched the hunger of her hidden antithesis. This darkness exists inside of everyone; it is the opposite of who a person is, the reverse of who they want to be. In her it was always there, breathing and chomping at some invisible bit and yearning to be free. In some the darkness is small and only rears its ugly head from time to time when one might commit a small offense. And then for some it can entirely take over to breed in the hearts of murderers, rapists and other kinds of sordid persons.
Somewhere in her clouded mind Jill heard her mother. That artificial laugh, the sorry attempt at coyness as she claimed a new man for her bed. Jill always despised that about her mother. Still, at this moment, the memory became like a siren and part of her wondered why she’d ever rebuked that sort of behavior. The conflicting thoughts battled inside her mind.
It felt like the darkness was wringing all of the good out of her soul until all she felt was nasty and despised. She felt the ugliness might consume her, causing her to give up her humanity and lose herself to the beast within. And it hurt.
Doc remembered very well that feeling even as he stood at her door and listened to Jill’s desperate sobs. He could feel her pain, feel her struggle and yet no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t force himself to enter the room and go to her. How could he face her when he was the one to have foisted this sentence on her? He’d made her what he most despised. H
e’d made her the thing that he wanted to kill within himself.
Both of his palms were flat against the wall outside her door and Doc’s head hung so that his chin nearly touched his chest. His breathing was broken and shallow and with every exhale he would clinch his fingers and scratch his lengthened and sharp nails against the Sheetrock. His repetitive motions dug little caverns into the wall and the ground gypsum flurried and fluttered to the floor at his feet.
“She needs you. Go to her. Help her.”
Doc felt a sob rising like bile into his throat and forced it down. He couldn’t verbally respond to Charlie’s entreaty and instead just shook his head. Before his friend could speak again he shoved himself away from the wall and then marched down toward his own room.
Charlie was left standing in the center of the hallway, alone. His head turned back and forth between Jill’s room and Doc’s room as he tried to decide what to do. Resignation pressed a huge weight against his shoulders until he finally walked away from them both and went to stand in the cold night air.
The Present – The Grey, Silent Hill
Daeglan’s cottage was much the same construction as the one they’d stayed at in Summer region of the realm, only this one was larger with two fireboxes. There was one at either side of the home that kept his recently arrived guests nice and toasty against the frigid temperatures outside.
Jill was sure that neither Devan nor her father had gotten much sleep overnight. She could hear them chattering in whispers well into the wee hours when exhaustion finally took over and Jill slipped into dreamland. She didn’t dream often, but that night thoughts of Doc and of their time together invaded her mind and awakened her with longing to hold him again. It had been years since she’d felt his touch, but still it seemed only yesterday.
She closed her eyes with regret. Why couldn’t she have just said the words to him? He’d waited with such patience and never pressed. Days had passed into weeks and then months and finally years, but she’d never once said those three words. The shame she felt was bitter and it fed the darkness in her. She’d hoped perhaps the darkness was gone completely in this world, but even this taste of her pre-vampire life couldn’t replace the emptiness she experienced in yearning to have Doc back.
“Ready to meet the Women?” Roon asked from his pallet across the way from her. His tone was light and jovial.
Frowning, Jill rubbed her eyes and stretched her arms out before answering. “I thought this was supposed to be about Devan. It’s like you’re hinting that I’m involved in all of this.”
The red-headed faery grinned like an imp, “All of it fits, beautiful Jill. All of it fits.”
She remembered the phrase. It was something Devan had told her about. Apparently she’d heard Rooney speak those words to encourage her just before she’d killed the vampire Adriel. That was when Devan proved to all of them but especially to herself that she truly was the “uber-witch.”
“You do realize you flirt with me one minute and look all love-lorn over Devan the next, don’t you? You can’t have it both ways, Rooney.” She knew her tone was nasty and she might have felt regret for saying it, but the damned man laughed at her. She snarled in return.
The door to the cottage opened and snow blew across the threshold before Devan and her father could get inside. They were both rosy cheeked and smiling as they stomped snow from their boots.
“We built a snowman!”
“Aye, and then ma’ angel made a snow-angel.”
Daeglan brushed snow from his daughter’s shoulders as the two of them approached the fire and held their hands toward the flames to warm themselves. After a moment the older man glanced over his shoulder, “I suppose we shoulda be going now. The Women shouldna be kept waiting.”
“The Women, the Women,” Jill muttered, standing, “Don’t we get to eat around here?”
A sound that seemed very much like an animal snorting came from Rooney’s direction, but Jill ignored him and approached a cupboard near one of the fireplaces. Without waiting for Daeglan to offer, she shuffled through the contents of the cabinet and found a loaf of bread wrapped in cotton and tore off a huge chunk. She wasn’t sure how long she’d be in the faery realm but she wanted to enjoy food for as long as possible.
“Holda on, lass. I’ve fruit, cheese and nuts in the root cellar,” Daeglan advised as he maneuvered back out into the cold.
Jill felt Devan’s hand on her shoulder and her friend pressed close to her ear as she whispered, “You okay? Is it Roon?”
Jill shook her head and patted her friend’s hand. “I’m okay. I just didn’t sleep well is all.”
After they’d eaten, the foursome began their journey to find the Women. Their direction was back south, but with a slight westerly turn. Devan and her father walked together just behind Jill and Roon who were leading the way. Jill made sure she kept pace with the red-haired faery. She knew that father and daughter still needed time together.
“So where is this place again?” she asked. Roon had tried to explain to them where the Women would be found, but Jill hadn’t been able to wrap her mind around it.
“Well, it ain’t really a place in the true sense. Think of it like your Washington D.C.”
She pursed her lips and drew her brows together. “You mean like how they made the nation’s capitol its own location, not within a state so that there wouldn’t be any preferential treatment.”
He pointed his finger at her like shooting a gun and winked. “You got it!”
Her smile was radiant and she raised her head just a bit in pride, but then her mind began churning again and she drew her lips to the side in consternation. “So for you all the seasons are important, and therefore the Women are in a place that isn’t Winter, Summer, Fall or Spring?”
“Some people see it that way. I tend to think they are in all at once. It’s all a matter of perspective.”
“So do you work for them or something?”
Roon snorted, “Technically everyone in the faery realm works for them, but on the current subject, I tend to be their favorite go-to boy.”
“The current subject?”
He only grinned. She realized she had taken a liking to the smart-mouthed faery, but still she immediately wanted to punch him at the same time. Acting as if he could read her mind, Roon lifted his hands in fists in front of his face and danced like a boxer in the ring. She felt a slight smile curl her lips before she could help herself. She licked her lips. When he started closer to her she shook her head and pointed a finger toward him to keep him back.
Roon clutched his heart as if wounded, moaning in feigned agony, then laughed before walking away from her.
They passed out of Winter and through Fall in just a few hours. The dividing line between Fall and Summer was evident again and instead of crossing over, Rooney began to lead them parallel to it, heading toward the West.
They traveled for some time before a large hill-like structure began to appear in the distance. As they moved closer they could see it was a ragged, rocky thing jutting sharply from the ground. All around it the grass and greenery ceased to exist and everything was grey and dull with scraggly briars surrounding the structure.
“Stairs!” Jill exclaimed, pointing. She lowered her hand sheepishly when she realized Roon must have already known there were stairs. She followed the winding staircase with her eyes and saw that they led all the way to the top of the hillock.
“They’re up there?” Devan asked as she and Daeglan caught up with them.
“Aye, lass. That they are,” the elder faery spoke.
Jill took a single step toward the stairs and then gasped and leapt back. “Oh my gosh! Do you hear that? Or not hear that rather, it’s like the sounds of life disappear and there’s complete silence when you get inside that circle. How the hell does that happen?”
“’Tis jest the way ‘tis,” Daeglan murmured softly.
Roon laughed, “Yeah, you’ll get the picture before you know it. The shit’s gon
na– ” The air wheezed from his lungs when Devan shoved the center of his back with the heel of her hand.
“Shut up, Roon. You never take things seriously.”
“I took you seriously, Devan.” He leaned closer. “I always took that sexy ass of yours very seriously and look what that got me.”
Devan rolled her eyes.
“Do we all get to go up there?” Jill asked, her mouth open in awe as she stared up toward the apex of the rocky hill.
“Jill, m’girl, of course you get to go up there. You are the reason we’re here.”
“Jill?” Devan exclaimed and shot a fiery look at Roon. “I thought I was the reason.”
He only smiled and winked.
The Past - The Darkness of Blood
Jill awoke a while later naked and sprawled on the bathroom floor with the now cold water spewing across her body. Despite the freezing shower she didn’t shiver and she wasn’t cold–at least not any colder than her new, “normal” temperature.
After sitting herself upright to reach to shut off the shower, she experienced a new, strange sensation: she was hungry. It wasn’t the sort of hunger you get when one misses a meal and then suddenly wants to eat twice as much for the next one to make up for it. No, this was a consuming hunger that frenzied the entire body, one that she'd never felt before. She throbbed with it in a way that it could not be denied.
Like a machine she removed herself from the shower and dried herself off. She thought the sound of crickets outside her window was inordinately loud. In fact, her ears were pulsing with an excessive and potent noise. She considered all the aspects of the change even as she curled and styled her hair. The darkness was speaking to her, taunting her. She knew just what she had to do to fulfill the hunger building up inside her.
The Bend-Bite-Shift Box Set Page 29