Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

P  A  R  T

T H R E E

VISASTRUTA

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T H I R T E E N

HOME

AGAIN

“Nothing is promised. There is only now.” 

-The Red Book

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“I really can’t see the bad part of that,” Avery Kominsky said when her son had finished speaking.

“Mom, did you hear ANY of what I just said?”

“Yes,” Avery said, folding her legs under her on the coach, and ashing her cigarette, “and the part about being abducted, and how they threatened you and almost killed me and your friends—that’s a bad part. And of course that they killed Blake. But as for you? The way things turned out? It’s really kind of awesome.”

“I’m a vampire.”

“Yes, I realize that, and I didn’t really know that shit was real. Obviously neither did you. But here you are, walking in the sun—sometimes—surfing, looking great! Apparently you’re going to be twenty-three forever, and you’ve got a boyfriend. A rich one from the sound of it.”

Sunny tilted his head and looked at her.

“Do you not get that I kill people?”

“The bad ones,” she said. “I can’t imagine you going and hurting people just minding their business, or even people who were crabby because they were having a bad day. And apparently that’s not something that happens. I mean, if it happened, we’d hear about it.”

“This is the weirdest and perhaps most disappointing response I ever expected from my own mother.”

“Alexander,” she said, and her voice changed.

“What do you want me to say? My baby was taken and terrorized and turned into something different. I now that. And for a time we were all in danger. But you rose above it. You rose above it and became something like a god. You’ll never be more than twenty-three. You’ll never be weak or old or need food, or apparently money. There are, I don’t doubt, many other hard things you will face. But all you can do is all you could ever do.”

She placed a hand to his cheek.

“Embrace who you are, and begin to love it.”

He hadn’t told anyone he was in town. Madema was beautiful, but it didn’t seem like home, except for his actual home, except for his mother. He had come in the late afternoon on his motorcycle. He’d traveled as soon as he could withstand the day, and in the evening he and Avery walked the beach and slowly the waves rolled to the sand, and then went out to the ocean again.

“You know what, Mom?”

She looked at him.

“The thing that scares me is you’re right.”

“Huh?”

“I… I’m not what I was, and that scares me. I’ll never really be a human being again and that is fucking scary. It really is. But… I love it. I love being what I am now, and I shouldn’t. I even love the kill, and I shouldn’t. I am so afraid that I’ll become something I don’t recognize anymore.”

Avery turned around and pulled him to her. He was bigger, but it didn’t matter, he placed his head on his mother’s shoulder as best he could.

He confessed, “I’m afraid I’ll become something you don’t recognize anymore. I couldn’t take that.”

“Do you want to see any of your friends?” Avery had asked him.

Sunny did not. What he was now was too different. His life was spent with people who drank blood and did not die, or did not die easily. He didn’t want to tell Sara or Jack or anyone. He wanted to be dead to them. He sensed that the day Gabriel had killed him he had indeed died to them forever. But maybe the whole trip west to Lassador was a type of procession toward death. This world, warm and beautiful as it was, had not been enough. Surfing, he came to that time where the wave curled over him like blue glass, sunstruck and heated by the near Mexican sun, and he was inside the saltwater womb. He was overwhelemed by the glory of it and glad, because he had been afraid that now that danger came not nearly so easy to him, he would not love to surf as he had. But he had never been in danger, not really. For him riding the waves had never been about that.

“I want to take you with me,” he told Avery while they sat on the beach and sea birds squawked.

“I can’t stay here, and I don’t love the idea of you so far away.”

“You’d take me from the horror of seventy-five degree winter days and crystal waves?” Avery jested.

Here the sky was polished blue, and the clouds were thin, only the ideas of clouds.

“What’s it like in Ohio?” she asked.

“It’s winter in Ohio, cold and ugly as shit.”

“And you can’t wait to get back there,” she said.

“I—” Sunny started.

“Your life is there,” Avery said. “And you can’t wait to get back.”

“One day can I bring you?”

“To a house of vampires?”

“They will honor you, Mother,” Sunny said.

There he was again, speaking in ways he never had until months ago. The way Avery looked at him said that, so he didn’t need to.

“One day I will come,” Avery said. “One day I must. But not in winter.”

“Snow,” Sunny laughed. “I love the snow.”

Avery eyed her son who seemed the same in every way, but whom with only a tilt of her head, she could see had changed.

“Something tells me you can afford to.”

Winter had come early that year. While they sat in their large bedroom, Sunny watched great movie sized snowflakes fall to the ground in the white night. Getting out of bed naked while Kruinh watched him, he had crossed the room and opened a second door that led to a little corridor, and then he had opened it and walked out into the night.

While he stood in the backyard, the snow falling on him, he assessed the feel of it. At last, when snow had piled like dandruff on his shoulders, Kruinh came out  as naked as he, the snow a contrast to his dark body coming from the dark house.

“How does it feel?” he asked.

The frozen ground on the soles of his feet, the freezing wind on his skin, the ice cold snow on his shoulders.

“It’s like the difference between drinking poison and… eating grape jelly,” Sunny said, turning to look at Kruinh.

“Before this would have killed me. It would have been unbearable.  It would even be painful, the human body’s response to an environment that can kill. But right now… it’s just like something I’d rather not feel, or like how I don’t care for grape jelly but I can eat it.”

Sunny shook his head and put his hands in his thick, snow blessed hair.

“But it’s different from that too… Because I like this cold. I feel it, but… I’m not bothered by it. When I was little, we’d come to the Midwest to visit my grandparents. I used to love playing in the snow, but I’d have to go in afrer a while… It would be too much. Right now I’m feeling that it will never be too much.”

Suddenly, Sunny said, “Life is so wonderful. Really it is.”

The two of them touched hands and turned around, closing the door behind them.

After standing in the yard, feeling the snow fall on his skin, everything else felt more. That was the best he could put it. The softness of the bed, the smoothness of Kruinh’s skin, the pressure of the great mattress, the blanketing of thick covers and the heat of Kruinh’s body. They made love slowly, but then they had made love several times, knew each other well, The touches of finger tips on flesh, lips pressed to lips said everything, spoke of how the night was theirs, and they might go out to ride the winds and find some unfortune soul, releasing its life under their jaws or, naked in this bed, surrender to each other’s jaws, savor the sweetness of taking blood one from the other, bite, drink, and fuck, entering and being entered one by the other.

When they’d first had sex, Sunny was afraid of the noises he would make, but Kruinh urged him on, and vulnerable to him, was free with his noise as well. Now, in the wake of love, they lay tangled together and laughing like little children, Kruinh’s rising and falling chest pressed to Sunny’s side.

“The longer I am with you, the lighter I become,” Kruinh said.

Turning so that he lay across Kruinh, so that he could kiss his eyes, his nose, his lips, Sunny said, “The more I’m with you, the older I become. It’s a fair exchange.”

“Is it?” Kruinh said. “I’d hoped it was, but somehow, being burdened with my centuries doesn’t seem like a fair exchange at all. When I taste you,” Kruinh murmured, tracing a finger over Sunny’s face, thrusting his fingers into his gold hair, “I taste sunlight on water, fresh air… palm trees.”

“Is that all?”

“No,” Kruinh said. “No, that is not all.’

Depression, abandonment, army trauma, sexual confusion, Sunny assessed, lingering memories of sexual abuse, old man fingers on him where they should never have been, things which he had buried until they had resurfaced in horrible ways. The bloodshare was the closest thing to mother’s milk drinkers had. In the bloodshare a mother or a maker passed their power, their years, their experience, even their personality to another drinker. As time went by, two very separate minds became yoked, could speak to each other at great distances. Two who were intense lovers barely needed to speak at all. One born to darkness and attentive bore many memories and senses of their mother, or their maker. A young vampire made by an old and powerful vampire quickly became older and powerful himself, and Sunny had been made by Gabriel who was not young, and not weak, wherever he was, and sustained every night by Kruinh, who was both old and powerful. The first time they’d made love and he felt Kruinh’s teeth sink into him, he had been surprised by the ecstasy of it, and only more surprised when his own teeth sank into Kruinh. A thrill ran through both their bodies, and the shuttling of flesh against flesh grew quick then quicker before they both exploded, trembling in the wake of orgasm.

That first morning, when Sunny had come to the house, and like someone hunting through a maze he had at last arrived at Kruinh’s room, the two of them stood together, face to face, pressed head to head, and Kruinh murmured, “How is it possible? I feel like I’ve always known you.”

He kissed him so deeply in the quiet of that room and Sunny had made sure the door to the suite of rooms was firmly locked. Kruinh took him by the hand, took him to the bedroom, and they shut that door firmly as well. He had pulled shut the curtains on even the hint of coming sun, and the two of them had sat on the bed, looking at each other, laughing. They kissed again, and lay across the great bed in darkness.

Hands opening, fingers touching like flower petals, kisses like mist fell upon Sunny’s skin. He felt bright, but he did not feel Sunny. He felt profound. He heard, running through his mind, Alexander, Alexander, Alexander, the name no one called him but Kruinh, coming with each kiss on his forehead, on his eyes, on his cheeks, his ears, in the soft pressure to his lips, on the fingers that removed his tee shirt and kissed his collarbone, kissed the place between his breasts, kissed nipples and the path to his navel, the fingers that made rivers of feeling up and down his sides, on his arms, made him aware of his whole body as he lifted his hips and let his jeans be pulled down. He wasn’t wearing underwear. Kruinh’s mouth took him so gently. He felt like he lay there for hours, innocent as creation, his body buckling and shaking, shuddering under the gentle pleasures Kruinh gave him. It was almost like he could see himself, and for once he rejoiced in his slender body, long, muscled limbs, strong thighs, his rounded buttocks, now cupped, gently entered by fingers, his growing penis. He rejoiced in the beauty of his young body seen through Kruinh’s eyes, and closed his eyes in pleasure, feeling those fingers, that tongue trace the lines of his body.

Kruinh had moved across the room now to put away one last thing, so that Sunny watched the steady movement of his round buttocks. He turned to Sunny, studying him.

Come here, he called to Kruinh without speaking. He was compact and brown, full in thigh and belly, arms strong, and his penis stood like an ensign. It bobbed as he came into the bed with Sunny. Sunny felt so limp, so very spent by Kruinh’s gentleness, and Kruinh seemed so full, so ready, so wishing to fill, that Sunny pulled him into him and lay eyes closed, gripping the mattress, rejoicing in being entered, pressed, fucked. It was like when Brad had done this to him, like and unlike. Sunny’s limpness became stiffness, the acceptance of his body became its own solidity, pressing back. They were a new thing and Kruinh’s hands took his and clasped them while his teeth sank into Sunny and then they both shuddered.

The sun was coming through the curtains when they both cried out in triumph, shaking as they spilled over with relief. When Kruinh threw up his head and screamed, he surprised Sunny with the force of seed shooting inside him.

Sunny’s eyes opened to see his own penis, thicker, longer than it had ever been, jumping, twitching as the waves of more than pleasure moved through him and expelled themselves in leaping arcs that caused him to gasp as once, twice, three times, a fourth, he shot into the air, spraying his stomach and the bed sheets beside him, left wet now, limp and incandescent.