The Blood: A Denouement

In 1803 at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, Glynn County, on the coast of Georgia there was grounded a slave ship called the Wanderer filled with Igbo and other West African captives from what is now Nigeria who were taken to the Georgia coast. In May 1803, the Igbo and other West African captives arrived in Savannah, Georgia, on the slave ship the Wanderer. They were purchased for an average of $100 each by slave merchants John Couper and Thomas Spalding to be resold to plantations on nearby St. Simons Island. The chained Igbo were packed under deck of a coastal vessel, the York, which would take them to St. Simons.

But the flying folk kept their power, although they shed their wings. All the time they were on that ship, they had felt the snarl of the driver's whip around their legs. They all felt their skin being torn to rags, and they all felt the ship’s chains and so, when their King called for them to do so, they rebelled, approximately 75 Igbo, and they took control of the ship, drowned their captors, but they were not sailors, so it was in that process the ship was grounded in Dunbar Creek.

That very day, the King of the Igbo declared, "The time is come." He raised his arms out to the others. And he sighed the ancient words that were a dark promise. He said them all around to the others in the field under the whip, "...kum yali... kum tambe...." He raised his hands and sang to Ala and Amadioha, Ikenga God of Strength, Idemmili, Ogbunabali, and especially Legba, who conceals.

They gave a great outcry. The Igbo straightened their bent backs and stood like spears. Old and young who were called slaves joined hands. Freed of their chains, one by one, they marched from the ship and leapt into the water, coming to shore and disappearing into the marshes. Rather than admit that living Black men were free in the hidden land, the white people said the Igbo were ghosts because Africans could not swim.

And so, the Igbo could fly. White men, lazy and murderous as they were, did not understand the marshes and feared them, while the Africans understood the heat and the land very well, so when white men dared the marshes to drag back the Igbo, those white men rarely came back.

After Kristian strauss had gone into the house, the others turned to go back inside as well, but as Jim was heading back, Seth caught his arm. The blond man looked at him and Seth shook his head.

“We’re going to walk a bit,” Jim said, clearing his throat, and he was conscious that the great pelt was still rolled up under his arms.

Lewis and Loreal nodded, but their faces revealed nothing, and it was Marabeth who smiled stangely as she went back into the house, and then the two young men were together on the great porch, and presently, they headed down into the green, and kept walking silently, Jim feeling Seth’s hand in his as they disappeared into the trees where Seth turned quickly, but gently, and pulled h im forward to kiss him.

They kissed for a long time, the blood rising in Jim, and Seth parted from him.

“When you came back from the woods it was still on you,” Seth said. “The wildness. The wolf. You even moved like a wolf, and I can smell the earth on you, and the grass… And the animal you killed. The wolf is on you.”

Jim responded by kissing Seth savagely, and they undressed in the trees, and lay on the pelt, their bodies moving togther roughly. Jim didn’t need to ask Seth if he would accompany him when he changed again. He knew Seth would be at his side, and whie Seth pulled Jim into his arms and inhaled the fragrance of him, Jim’s musk, he understood suddenly what Lewis and Chris had found in each other, the companion who understood their wild nature, who wasn’t afraid of it, who, in fact, rejoiced in it, for he had rejoiced when the gold white wolf came out, rejoiced when he had seen the lamp eyed wolf that was James Strauss trotting beside the night dark one that was Marabeth. He rejoiced in the new way his lover walked.

“You don’t have to hide anymore,” Seth murmured.

Jim parted from him, his eyes hooded, and Seth brushed his unshaven cheek.

“You thought… I thought it too, that being out there was no hiding left. But the fact that you liked men wasn’t the only thing about you, about either of us, and everything else you did, being pleasant, being sweet, hiding your pain so that Kris envies you because he thinks you don’t know pain, was you hid the wolf.”

“Pamela, my… grandmother, she said I should be careful of the wolf. I didn’t know what she meant.”

Jim leaned on one elbow, and there was a leaf in his hair, but it hardly mattered.

“Be careful of it, James,” Seth said, tenderly, “but don’t deny it.”

He drew Jim down, the heat of his body hotter in the warm night. They moved together, kissing hungrily, and Jim sucked on Seth’s shoulder until he bit him. Seth felt the tearing of skin the way he had the first time he’d been with Chris, and almost by instinct, he sank his fingernails into Jim’s back like claws.

They were still for a moment before, deliberately, almost with a curiosity, as if another hand were doing it, Seth caressed the smoothness of the soft skin of Jim’ ass, and then, just like that, with the sharp nail of his little finger, he drew blood, and Jim winced, his buttocks clinching as Seth took his finger to his mouth and tasted Jim’s blood.

“Fuck me,” Seth said, his voice quiet. “Don’t hold back. Don’t be gentle. Fuck me as hard as you want. I need it. I need you to hurt me. A little at least.”

Jim sat up, kneeling, and he made a hocking noise and let a long thread of thick saliva trail from his mouth to his cock, which was thick and arched up toward him out of the darkness.

In the night, under the trees, the darkness was filled with the low, intense sounds of two men fucking, and when Jim had groaned and shouted and come, he turned around and demanded Seth do the same to him They had been so tender with each other in the past, and in need of this tenderness, but now they needed this roughness, and when the roughness was done with them, they lay together exhausted. The night, full of their jarring cries and deep groans and touched by the sounds of young bodies slamming together was quiet now, and the radiating sounds of crickets filled their ears, the tiptoeing of night creatures, the fluttering of wings and the chirp to chirp of birds risen before the morning. In the night the growing moon shone on their bodies, limbs muddied by dirt and grass and smudged of blood, sprawled in contentment past exhaustion, Jim’s head in Seth’s arms, Seth caressing his golden hair.

Jim kissed the bloodied place on Seth’s breast and said, “I love you so fucking much.”

Instead of speaking, Seth lay still while his body was overtaken by emoton, and he responded to Jim one a deep sobbing that rose from the pit of him as he pulled Jim closer and continued to run his hands over Jim’s shoulders.

For a long while Lewis lay in Chris’s arms and he did not wish to move.

“I feel that…” Chris murmured.

“What?”

“Something’s going on in your head.”

“I want to sleep,” Lewis explained, but things are not right.”

Chris waited for an explanation.

“If you could have seen him, if you could have seen the look on Kris Strauss’s face when Marabeth and Jim made the transformation.”

“I imagine it was nice for them, if nice is the word.”

“But not exactly helpful for him. Not one step closer to…”

Lewis sat up in bed, and Chrir watched him sitting on the side of the mattres, nude, smooth skinned and all brown like velvet, and then Lewis stood up and Chris watched him pull on the hooded housecoat, mourning the robing of coffee colored flesh, rounded ass, tender sex so dear to him, but he did say, “Now you look like the witch you are.”

“Don’t just look at me you beautiful vampire,” Lewis said. “Come.”

The two fo them went down the hall and knocked on Kris’s door. They never thought he might beasleep, and he wasn’t. The large room was full of the smell of cigarette smoke, and before he was offered one, Lewis took a Marlboro for himself, and then held out his hand for the lighter.

He had smoked half the cigarette when he said from the windowseat he had invited himself to, “Don’t think we’ve forgotten. we still don’t know what we came for.”

“Mara gets journals and a pelt and Jim does too, but I get nothing. I get these files, these histories, interesting enough but telling me nothing.”

`Lewis refrained from saying that he should be fair, that he should remember what Marabeth had told Lewis, that Kris had refused to read the journals. But Kris probably did not know that Marabeth had shared this confidence, and he would not have appreciated Lewis bringing it up.

“We didn’t come here so Jim and Marabeth could learn to turn into wolves and have fun putting on skins. We came here so I could learn to stop turning into something every time the moon was full.”.

“You came here,” Chris Ashby said, flatly,while Lewis was still thinking of something politic to say, “to learn what you were, and you are learning, slowly.”

Kris opened his mouth, but Christopher Ashby held up a hand.

“Once, I was a man and a very plain one, and one night I was attacked—“

“By a vampire.”

“By French soldiers. Kruinh gave me the choice to die right then or live forever, and I chose life and woke to something I never planned on being. These gifts given by the Dark Hand of God,” Chris shook his head, “we must learn how to live with them.”

“I don’t want to learn to live with them,” Kris Strauss said. “I want to be rid of them.”

“And what I am saying to you,” Chris Ashby said, his voice taking on a very different tone, Lewis noted, “is that there may be no getting rid of them. There may be only learning to live with them.”

“I’ve lived with mine for over twenty years.”

Lewis did not speak, because he saw that his platinum haired lover was not done.

“You have not lived with it. You have lived against it. That is what the medicine did. Now you must learn to live as you are, the same as I do. Jim and Mara made their first kills tonight, but I made one in a long list of kills earlier, going out into the towns to find the life that I would end. We must make our peace with such things, or lose our minds.”

The flaw in Rosamunde’s plan was her great confidence. The next flaw was that she had no idea that Dan knew Germantown, or that he could walk the next seven blocks to Myron’s house. Myron’s wife was as excited to see Dan as Myron, and they both loaded him down with questions.

“Are you in trouble?” Jen demanded, looking at him.

“Yes,” Dan said, “but I won’t be if I can just get to Glencastle before the night is over. I left my car at the Midland Hotel.”

Myron and Jen were not the sort of people to ask wearisome questions, and Jen pointed out, “If you left it there, then it’s been towed, and we can figure that out later. Myron, take Dan to Glencastle.”

Myron questioned nothing. The kids were curious, but he just kissed them on the heads and said, “Later. Daddy loves you.”

If Dan had known what Myron was, or if Myron had known it himself, then Dan would have told him about the last night, but when Myron said, “Is it something to do with that girl?” all Dan said was, “Yes.”

“She’s not dead is she?” Myron asked levelly, as they zoomed down Buren headed for the state road.

“No. But she’s bad news, and… there’s really only one way I can do anything about her.”

Myron nodded, rubbing his finger under his nose and squinting into the night.

“I got you, buddy.”

Dan had a sense that, as they were approaching Brummel Street, that Myron understood something of what Dan was trying to do, that he remembered that day almost fifteen years ago when they had tried to find that house. He didn’t know how many times Dan had looked for it on his own, and right now Dan thought, I need you, I need you to be here, and then he was surprised by the ordinariness with which he saw, between 4846 and 4850, a tall purple Victorian, its lights on through the buses and trees. 4848 Brummel.

“Thank God! Wait for me,” Dan said, and Myron, who did remember not being able to find this housei, nodded and watched as Dan ran up the path.

He banged on the door rapidly, and it was opened by a tall, brunette vampire with dark Mediterranean features and wide dark eyes, a look of both concern and suspicion on his face. Dan stood blinking at him, and he said, “Can I... help?” Then… “Who are you? I know you are not human?”

“I’m as human as you,” Dan said. “Please, I need Kruinh or Tanitha.”

The elegant vampire and shirt who looked as if he was on his way to a business meeting eyed him cautiously, but said, “Come in.”

Dan was aware of Myron outside waiting, when this austere vampire closed the door, and he wondered if Tanitha and Kruinh would even remember him and then moments later, Tanitha came down the stairs into the foyer, her shawl wrapped around her but her eyes were wide as she looked Dan up and down.

She flung out her hand and terrified Dan, pronouncing, “Tazi kŭshta da bŭde vidyana zavinagi i nikoga da ne e skrita ot teb. Zashtoto si krŭv ot moyata krŭv!”

And then she said, “From now on this house is always open to you, Daniel. What has happened to you? You have been…” she came nearer, passing the other vampire, and grasping Dan’s chin, “made.

“Who did this?” she wondered. There were, after all, not that many vampires.

“Rosamunde—”

Before he finished both she and the dark haired vampire hissed, and Tanitha swore, “Kuchka ot yamata na ada!

“Lawrence,” Tanitha said, her voice regaining some of its composure, “take Daniel upstairs and get him a room. Daniel, did you come with that man, waiting outside the house?

How had she seen that? But, nevermind.

“Yes.”

“First tell him you are with us now. That will take care of this business. Oh, that whore, I will rip her fangs out with my bare hands,” Dan heard Tanitha saying as he went out of the door, but even as he told Myron that he was safe and that he would tell him all later, he knew he would only tell him some of it, and when Dan was walking back up the to the house, he was still surprised that 4848 Brummel remained and would continue to remain in his vision, and never be hidden from him again.

“Dan,” the tall, brunette business vampire offered his hand as Dan closed the door behind him, “you can call me Laurie.”

He placed a hand on Dan’s shoulder.

“Let’s find you a room.”

[1] “This house be forever seen and never hidden from thee. For thou are blood of my blood.”