Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

“What are you?”

“I am a king.”

“A king?”

“Daniel, you know Dan, Daniel is my lieutenant. Christopher and Lawrence are generals. At the moment Tanitha is my council though she is, of course, a princess.”

“You are king?” Sunny had said, “of the vampires?”

“I am a king,” Kruinh had said, “of some vampires.”

And then he had said, “Aluka”

“Drinkers,” Sunny had said, and the word suited him. Vampire was a thing out of a bad novel…. Or, rarely, a good novel. This new reality of his was something different altogether.

At first he had not understood. It was not that he did not believe Kruinh, but there was no vampire kingdom on any map he’d seen. He assumed that Kruinh meant his home was his castle, and his kingdom was on 4848 Brummel Street. He should have known better, for with the blood share came sense memories pulsing through his body of candlelit halls, elegant balls, beautiful men and women in rich clothing, nights where gondolas floated down canals, their dark water sparkling not only with the wavering stars but the lights of palace windows reflected on them as well.

David said he had vacation time, and Tanitha said, “Well that is excellent. We will go to Visastruta.”

It was not yet quite winter, and Kruinh had said little about any world outside of their household. In fact, they rarely talked of things which were not immediately before them. The household was made of David, Kruinh, and Tanitha. Dan had his own rooms and stayed between them and the apartment beside Brad and Nehru, and often Sunny did as well. Kruinh’s love was not a possessive one. At least twice a week, silent as bats, Chris Ashby or Laurie Malone arrived, but they lived in Chicago.

More than once, moving through the halls, Sunny had passed alarmingly old photographs of them both. He could tell the difference between an artful black and white and a hundred year old sepia print. In one, smoking nude, one leg crossed over the other, was Lawrence Malone. In a past life he must have been a model. But of course he was, if he hadn’t started out so very angry at the drinker turned business man, a model would have been the first career he’d chosen for him.

“How do you get here?” Sunny had asked, once he was over his initial anger at them.

“We fly,” Laurie had said.

“You don’t mean take a plane, do you?”

“No,” Laurie said, while Chris shook his head.

Chris said, “We can show you. If you’d like?”

He would like, and that night together they climbed to the high rooftop of 4848 Brummel Street, looking over the neighbhorhood.

“You’ve done it before, surely,” Laurie said. “If you’ve killed, you’ve done it.”

“I’ve leapt,” said Sunny. “From one building to another. I’ve leapt down a few stories.”

“Well, this is leaping,” Chris said. “Only…. You don’t stop leaping. Take our hands.”

Sunny was not afraid. He was constantly surprised by the things this new body could do. He was delighted when the leaping he often did, from the roof to the ground, from one height to another, became flying. Before the night was done they were quickly moving from one end of town to another.

“If you’d like,” Laurie said, “when we come back we can fly to Lassador?”

Chris, looking very young and eager, nodded his agreement.

They were trying to make peace with him.

We are family now. Had Kruinh said this, or had Sunny simply realized it, looking at these two men. These are your brothers.

Who on earth, aside from Gabriel and Rosamunde—wherever they were—knew what it was like to be him? To do the things he could, or the things he must do?

But before Laurie and Chris had come back, it was Dan who took him whizzing over the streets of Glencastle, wind ripping through him at amazing speeds as they bulleted up the highway and soared into Lassador. The whole of the great city with all of its skyscrapers and noise, lights and crime, crawling cars, silent neighborhoods, stretched beneath them, then things became quieter and darker, traveling east until they dived down on the Grey Note. Time would forever be different to Sunny now. He remembered everything, saw everything beneath him, and yet the journey from Glencastle to Rawlston had taken five minutes.

“And we can go even faster.”

“Laurie and Chris—”

“Are older and stronger than us. They can make it from here to Chicago in under two minutes.”

“I told them they could be the ones to fly with me through Lassador for the first time.”

Dan shrugged and grinned.

“Then let them think they were.”

The evening they had planned the trip to Visastruta, a luxurious red Bughatti purred up before the house and out of it, in immaculate white shirt and shades, stepped Lawrence Malone while, out of the other side, in jeans, turtleneck and Ray Bans, pale blond hair spiked, came Chris Ashby, the two of them looking like very rich boys or, as Kruinh put it, vampires out of an Anne Rice novel.

Beneath his shades, Laurie had only given Kruinh a bright, long grin.

“No…. flying?” Sunny said.

“It’s hard to fly with luggage, little brother,” Laurie said.

“Then… Visastruta… Flying?”

Tanitha was wrapped in elegant fur, wearing a great broad brimmed hat shielding half of her face while David took her hand.

“In a plane,” she said. “Like civilized folk. You can’t flap your arms around the world.”

Along with Bughatti, they took Kruinh’s car, and David’s, and they drove to the little airport outside of Glencastle where a private plane awaited. They climbed on board something like a very comfortable house with wings. Sunny had to stop himself from touching everything, and Kruinh grinned with pleasure at his lover’s surprise. But David had no shame, and he kept saying, “Look at this!” and “Look at that!” closing and opening pantry and refrigerator doors. As the plane took off, Sunny reflected that, while he had not thought Kruinh was poor, he had not, until now, understood just how wealthy he was.

It had been some time since Sunny had flown, and he wasn’t entirely sure where they were going. He didn’t ask. He’d never been that kind of person. He preferred to sail above the indifferent cloudscape, and he wondered if the pilot was a Drinker or if he, like David, had fallen in with these strange people Sunny now belonged to. When the plane touched down on an airfield, and they were all transported to two long limousines, Sunny looked around the land beyond the airfield and it was Kruinh who said, “We are in France.”

The world was still green. Winter had not settled in. He had, for some reason, never associated France with forests, with these high trees and wild spaces of rivers, waterfalls, herds of leaping deer. He realized that up until now France had been a square shaped country on a map, a little bigger than a walnut, with an Eiffel Tower and a Notre Dame squeezed into it. He could not imagine so much land or so much road, or so many lonely spaces, and the many towns squatting in the distance off the road.

At last the trees gave way to a castle out of fairytale. It was tall and white and many turreted with a blue tiled roves and reached by a three arched bridges like iced sugar extending over a wide, placid river. The whole thing was amber colored in the closing light of this autumn afternoon. Even as they passed through the bustling town beneath the place, warm lights winked down from the windows of the castle, and when the cars came through the gates and stopped at a hooded entry before the driveway, Sunny said, “This cannot be Visastruta.”

Visastruta did not sound like it was in France, and Kruinh and Tanitha—whose accents sounded not quite American, but more American than not—did not have French names. This great white palace, easily the size of a luxury hotel, reminded Sunny of the time his racist grandmother had them stay at the Biltmore and bragged about that family and things she should never have bragged about.

“It isn’t Visastruta,” Chris Ashby said. “This is Chaperon.”

“This is Christopher’s home,” Kruinh explained.

“What?”

Shooing servants away, Chris picked up his own bags, more than could have comfortably been carried by a human of his size.

“It is my home sometimes,” he said. He turned to walk inside of the palace, greeting the servants as he passed.

“He never comes here,” Dan said in a low voice.

“Once,” Tanitha said offhandedly as she could, “Christopher loved a man, but he died as is the human way, and Christopher did not. They possessed this castle together for years, in great happiness, and when that man died, Christopher turned his back on it.”

“We shouldn’t have come, then,” Sunny said.

“We had to land somewhere,” Tanitha said. “This is one of our holdings, and we have traveled across the Atlantic. We… are used to sorrow. You cannot live for a long time and not be filled with it. If Christopher did not want us here, he would have said so.”

However old the castle was, and Sunny suspected the answer was “very”, it had been outfitted with modern conveniences so that it possessed the quality of a very fancy hotel. The rooms had thick velvet carpeting and were well heated, the windows double plated and secure against cold. Lifts led to the apartments where they would be staying, and the rooms where Sunny stayed with Kruinh were wide and low ceilinged, which Sunny realized made things warmer, and had two bathrooms in them, great windows on both sides, each looking over the river, for the castle seemed to be built on a sort of island, and as dusk fell, deer rolled over the hills.

Kruinh and Sunny stripped immediately, Sunny feeling the warmth of the carpet between his toes. In the shower they washed the day away and made love a little, kissed a little, retired to the bed to stretch out and dry in the heat of the room.

“I want you,” Kruinh said after a while.

Seeing his penis rise, curved like a dark fruit, Sunny felt himself just as aroused. Outside the moon rose and he said, “Do you feel like I feel?”

Kruinh turned over, kissing him, wrapping his legs around Sunny and pressing his strong chest against him while Sunny ran his hands over Kruinh’s body. But they did not fuck. Erect, excited, they linked hands, and left the bed. The new old fashioned windows, they climbed from. They leapt into the night, their senses high for the kill. This was their land and its people under their protection, so they had to go a bit afield. They had to go into the city, wrapped in darkness. A couple importing North Africans as slaves fell under their jaws. A man waiting in the bushes to rape a woman walking through the park was next. As they crouched, naked, aroused in the night, mouths covered in blood, Sunny’s nostril’s widened. His hair stood up.

“There are more out here. More for the taking.”

Kruinh, greedily feasting from the neck of the rapist, did not speak at once, and when he did he looked as one sated, his mouth red, his white teeth pronounced against his firm, dark lips.

“But we are not the only ones who must eat,” he reminded Sunny.

Sunny nodded. He was not chided. He came to Kruinh, excited by the lust they’d held at bay, excited by his penis, thick and risen over firm thighs from the black bush of hair, excited by the blood smeared across Kruinh’s face, all over his brown body, and by the scent of blood Sunny smelled on himself. They came together, kissing, biting, locked in savage fucking, making no noise until some time later when they lay face to face, heaving in the darkness, the dead body only a few feet from them.