The Wicked: A Love Story

About Alexander Continued

When it happened to him, the first thing Sunny had thought of was his family, of how to get back to him.

“It wouldn’t even be possible,” Evangeline had said to him. She was alive back then. “You’re new. You cannot walk in the day and you cannot not feed.”

“Feed?”

“But you know what you are,” she had said. “You know what Rosamunde made you, and what you are is something that must feed, on and on, and that cannot live without drinking.blood. Welcome to what you are?”

“So, I’m stuck here,” Sunny said, and he hated saying that because the words were totally unnecessary. The smile on Evangeline’s face made him want to stab her. Stabbing would have done nothing.

When he slept he dreamed of the sun and of the white beach. He dreamed of the waves that were like liquid glass that yellow sun shone through, turning blue and green and white as they curled and rippled over him like liquid stain glass. He was not a poet, he had a hard time stating how he felt when he was on a surfboard or when he was simply on the beach, when he was running with the wind through his hair. This business was never supposed to happen to him. He was never supposed to be sleeping in a casket, and getting up to kill people at night.

That was what he hated. That he had not come gently into that long night of death. That when Rosamunde had made him, she had not personally fed him. She had sent him out into the streets to kill and come back home.

“If you don’t come back, where will you go?”

The first time, he hadn’t killed. He had resisted his urge the whole night, feeling a hand that clawed him from the inside, scratched at the inside of his very being, made his veins bulge out. He’d gone back into his coffin twitching and screaming, and as it had been locked on him in the approaching day, he had been rocking and battering against it and Rosuamnde’s voice said, “Don’t worry, he’ll figure it out soon.”

He had figured it out, or rather, it had been figured out for him. It was what Sunny hated them for the most. He had nearly leapt out of the coffin that second night, his face red and white, veins bulging and teeth gnashing.

“We have a thing for you,” Rosamunde had announced.

Carter had unveiled her.

Sunny could still see her now, how beautiful she had been, She was a work of art, the most beautiful girl he’d seen till then, like Venus, her skin utterly white, her breasts round and high, her hair deep red, her face terrified. Her body trembled. If he could say anything now to the girl bound to the stake he would say, “Do not worry, no one will harm you.”

But when they had released him, and he opened his mouth, what he did was launch himself upon her and sink his jaws into her throat. As he growled with consummation, she was gone in a shower of blood and gnawing, and his pain began to dampen as his jaws clamped down on her broken windpipe, and she died in his arms. The madness cleared from him and as she died, the pain in him died, the hunger was assuaged, and at last the madness, and when he was done he lay there with the dead girl in his arms, understanding what he had done.

Even though Alexander Kominsky, generally known as Sunny, would bring up far more than once the moment when Kruinh Kertesz had set him on fire, that was not the first time he had met him.

Years later he would see the giant painting of Ivan the Terrible, where he was kneeling on the floor of his palace, holding the dead and bleeding body of his son, his eyes wide with horror and terror as he cradled him. The moment he saw it he ran from the gallery and vomited and Kruinh had found him on his knees, weeping, the way he was weeping this moment when he held the girl.

“Now you’ve eaten,” Carter said over him. “Now you are back to yourself. Now you understand how necessary it is to always drink.”

Above his head, dispassionate, not happy or sad, Rosamunde had said, “You are too young to not eat. Do not try such stunts again.”

Sunny was one of five. Rosamunde and Carter had made them all, all of them new, all of them sleeping in coffins by day and doing what they were told in the night. One called Mitch said, “You just have to learn to do what they say. Then it’s better.

“I learned, the one called Tom said, “that no one’s really that great, and if you just pick someone to… you realize everyone’s done something wrong and nobody’s totally innocent.

Sunny went out that night to find his kill. He was working nights at the bar he’d come to, and his employers could tell no real difference in his life. After all, he was from out of town, and no one was paid to care for a server.

Sunny was drawn to him, and the attraction had never stopped. This lean faced elegant man sitting there, composed and concentrated, and he came to him and poured more water and said, “Is there anything else I can get you?”

And Kruinh said, “Why don’t you get your best wine.”

Sunny smirked. “Our best wine is about eight bucks.”

“Well, then,” Kruinh smiled and held open his hands, ‘Why don’t we make that happen? I can certainly spare eight dollars.”

“And do you prefer—?”

“A red,” Kruinh said.

When Sunny pulled away from him he knew two things, “He s like me. He is a vampiure. And also, “He knows that I am as well.”

“You don’t look like you’re from around here,” Sunny said, pouring the wine.

“I look like I am as much from around here as do you,” Kruinh told him.

Sunny smiled and said, “Fair. I came looking for my dad. He came from around here. I found something else entirely.”

“That’s often how it is,” Kruinh said.

“And you?” said Sunny.

“I’m looking to settle. My family got an old property around here, and I’m getting moved in.”

They talked through the night and Suuny was drawn to the elegant man, and finally Kruinh said. “You look hungry. You have the look of someone who comes to a city and doesn’t know the good places to eat.”

Everything in Sunny sharpened. He sat upright, but said nothing.

Kruinh said, “When you learn to listen, you know all the great places, but you are young so right now I’ll simply tell you, if you go over to Victor Terrace you will find all the great cuisine you’re looking for. Especially this time of night.”

Kruinh nodded, as if tipping his hat, then place an actual tip on the table, and stood to leave.

Sunny was off forty-five minutes later, and he discovered the speed that became flying in him. At Victor Terrace he found a man crawling up a trellis to murder and rape an old woman, and it was wonderful—no that was not the right word—how the thoughts rose from murderous minds like shouting. Even as the man’s fingertips touched the window ledge, Sunny, like a hawk, lit upon him and pulled him into the darkness, sinking his fangs into the man and draining him of life. It was a feeling more exhilarating than surfing.

Alexander Kominsky loved killing people. He wasn’t like Dan or even Chris sometimes. There was very little ambiguity in the kill, perhaps because his first kill had been so awful and so certainly wrong. The feeling of leaping out in the night onto the back of a would be murderer or soon ot be rapist, and ripping his throat out, the spray of blood on the face and down the throat, was wonderful. Evil knew several faces, and Sunny had grown more nuanced in his work over the years. Reading the papers to learn of a man who was about to evict everyone in his building and toss them out on the streets with nothing, and then breaking into his house, coming slowly, room by room through his house, filling him with terror before he met his end, was lovely. Women who had abused their children and lived to tell the tale, or rather to keep it secret, died well in his arms. Groups of teenagers who harassed a gay boy to suicide or any girl to her own life taking, were like rare treats to be taken one by one. Over time his ears grew sensitive to those crying out for mercy. They thought they were crying out to God, but some were crying out to him, to be delivered from the boy who had shamed her, the kids who kicked him and called him faggot, the judge who was about to sentence you to life and prison even though he damn well didn’t believe you had done it. They all had fallen before the avenging angel called Alexander Kominsky. Throats gurgled, necks snapped, and never had Sunny given his killings a second thought unless the thought was pleasure. There were over eight billion people on the planet and many suffered, but many caused suffering with pleasure, and to wipe them out as the lion takes the gazelle was the chief joy of Sunny who had known injustice himself. That first night, guided by Kruinh to Victor Terrace, he had felt the joy of killing, and never turned back.

Was he a savior? No. Was he a vigilante trying to bring justice? Not at all. Did he feel like he was doing good for the sake of humanity, impressed with a noble task? Maybe at the beginning. At the beginning it had certainly helped to tell himself that. But he was what all vampires were, a predator, and in order to give some boundaries to his predation, rules were set down. Were the rules vague? Yes. Could the lines be crossed? Easily. In an ethics class could one debate if it was right to kill someone because they were intending to murder someone as they climbed a trellis, yet had not actually done it, though the knife was in hand? Supposedly. And there were all manner of uncomfortable moral questions swimming around what he did. Except this was not about morality, it was about predation, and setting down rules meant that he knew full well that the madness that had struck him so that a girl died in his savage arms was unjust, and the rule of untamed hunger was the true evil. He could not exactly say what deaths were totally just, but he knew he could only afford to think of justice and not commit mindless atrocities because he fed. He began to think like this at the end of his fifth night in the house of Rosamunde, and returned to that house sated, strange, different from the others.

“I don’t like what has come over you,” Carter said.

Sunny only smiled as he climbed into his coffin.

Had he known that he would never speak to Carter again, his smile would have been even wider.