Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

This thing, this odd way in which his first time has occurred is probably the reason he goes looking for Tanitha and Kruinh the next day. He and Myron don’t talk about this after they’ve dropped her off and are getting ready to get back in the car. Dan needs something to say, needs to clear his head.

“You know what I’m thinking?” he says to Myron.

“Huh?’

“I’m thinking of just not going to college and staying here doing music.”

But Myron is angry for some reason. He’s going to be angry for a few days and hard to talk to for a while. There is going to be a little wall up between them for a while.

Myron just looks at Dan witheringly.

“That’s really stupid.”

Dan Rawlinson is past jealousy. He’s a little confounded because the band never took off. They tried for years, and it seems like he might want to settle into his father’s plumbing business, and put this music to the side. Myron never agrees when Dan suggests that, but then Myron is working with his family still. The only thing he ever says is, “Dan, you could come in on the business.”

That seems like the ultimate failure, to take charity from Myron’s family. Myron went to school and graduate school to do what he does, to really do… he isn’t exactly sure what Myron does. But it’s something smart people do and something Myron had always planned.

And then Myron’s got the good home and the wife and kids, and Olivia’s great and the kids are adorable, and sometimes it sort of hurts that his best friend is so successful, and it sort of hurts to be hurt by it. That isn’t right. It’s not gracious.

When he has a beautiful girl on his shoulder, or better yet, when they are together, really together and it seems like real life is going to start, like it felt with Eileen, none of that matters until it ends and Dan feels like shit all over again.

 

He felt like shit that night when Two and the Band had finished their set. Rick and Jack were long gone, and now they had Craig and Angelo. Eileen had been a singer in the band, Eileen, who had his engagement ring, Eileen whom he had looked at houses with, Eileen whom he had found in bed with Craig.

So Craig was just business, He was fulfilling his part of the contract and getting the fuck out of the club without looking at Dan, and he knew he had to stay till they found another member. This was a business. They weren’t the most important band in the world, but they made money. People expected them to be a full band that rose above its personal bullshit.

“That was a great set you guys played,” the redhead said to them.

“Oh, thank you,” Dan said.

“Especially you.”

She smiled at him. He needed a smile.

“You look like the saddest man in the world,” the woman said. “Let me get you a drink.”

Dan shrugged and said, “Okay, but I have to get the next one.”

“We’ll see what happens.”

They drank for a while, and Myron was with them, but in the end he squeezed Dan’s shoulder and said, “I’m about to go.”

“Oh, goodnight, Myron.”

The red haired woman’s voice was lush. Dan couldn’t place her accent, tell exactly where in America it was coming from. For a moment he thought it was almost as if she was making a generic accent up.

Before Myron departed, Dan whispered to him at the door, “I think…. She wants me to go home with her.”

Myron smiled warmly at his friend.

“I think you should, Dan. You deserve a little happiness.”

“I’d be happy if I still had my fiancé.”

“Fuck her,” Myron said with more heat than he’d intended.

“If you can’t have happiness the way you want, at least have some attention you deserve.”

He made a little phone gesture with his hand.

“Call me in the morning.”

The woman is glorious. She smells like… Dan isn’t quite sure what she smells like, but honey is there, and he knows he’s going to bed with her. She has the most lustrous, thick red hair and green eyes, and she tells him, “I’m staying at the Midland Hotel. I’m visiting family.”

Dan has only passed the Midland Hotel on Bancroft, tall and elegant, one of the oldest hotels in the city, and here he is in a lobby looking up at the second floor through a wraparound gallery, and there are marble arches under a vaulted ceiling. He’s trying not to grin like a rube, and she’s laughing and kissing him on the cheek. They’re going up in an elevator, and he cannot believe his good fortune. Maybe things are getting better after all.

They have another drink and she makes a bath, and they make love in the bath, and while Dan remembers what it’s like to be with a woman who isn’t Eileen, she drains the tub and they move to the shower and from the shower to the bed.

She is running her hands over his body. He is gently sucking her lips, kissing her nipples, taking his tongue up and down her soft skin, creamy skin, flesh like ivory as she laughs in exultation. When she touches him it’s like the first time in a long time he’s really felt his own penis, the first time he’s felt it be this swollen thing, sensitive to the touch, curving, growing, hard, wet with the trickle of semen, wet with whatever she’s got on her hand while she’s massaging him, stroking him, pulling him, someone else’s hand on him for the first time in a long time.

“Come on,” she says, her hands caressing his ass, pulling him inside of her.

“Oh, God,” she murmurs, or is he murmuring? It feels so good. He’s needed this. Her hands are so tender up and down him, and it feels so good. He shudders. It feels so good to push and push into her, cock encompassed by this moist heat, and he wants to keep doing it, but he’s slow about it, wanting to be gentle, there are vague memories of another red headed girl, a backseat of a car long ago, but not far away. And then her hands are up and down his back and she’s clutches his shoulders and growls into his ear, “Fuck me.”

And so he starts to fuck her, and he can feel her thighs around him, pulling him deeper inside of her, and he can hear himself growling between his teeth, and she is rejoicing and calling, “Fuck me! Fuck… me. Harder… Do it… hard.”

They’re both breathing hard together and his heart is pounding, his whole body is pounding, and then Dan is surprised and cries out while he comes. Somewhere along the line, sex with Eileen became tame. Maybe that’s why she started fucking someone else. Dan keeps slamming into his new lover, exhausting himself, surprised at his shuddering body, his aching balls, and at how long his body rocks on this orgasm, how much he spills, when fingernails, sharp in his back, draw blood, become as insistent as claws. He answers with a harder thrust as she pulls his face down and suddenly the gently nipping teeth prick, clamp down into his throat, and in an agonizing, strangling moment everything changes as, at the last of his coming, his body reeling from orgasm, he is turned around and feels the insistence of the fangs. His body convulsing with death and a terror that has replaced pleasure, fire filling his arteries as life and strength drain away, teeth buried his his throat, his body thrashing, blood being rapidly sucked from his vessels, Dan knows….

Tanitha and Kruinh… They were vampires.

This woman is a vampire…

He knows…

I… am dying.

Daniel Rawlinson was forty two thousand feet in the air, beside his friend Myron Keller when he wondered about the long haired blond to whome he’d given his journals. He had put all of himself into those journals, and once he’d met someone who said, “That is a work of magic.”

“What does that mean?” Daniel said.

“Whatever you were you are not anymore,” he had been told. “Whoever has what you write, the two of you will be linked.”

He remembered his last great linking, in that hotel room,when Rosamunde had sunk her teeth into her throat, and he knew that this boy had, at last, reached that part of his story.

Daniel Rawlinson had come into his second birth screaming, and there were hands on him, holding him down as his veins pounded with a burning fire and his heart raced. His body was at once more hungry than it had ever been and stronger than he’d ever known. He felt its strength in the resistance of stronger arms.

“Are you simply going to stand there?” A man’s voice demanded, “or are you going to help?”

While he struggled, only dimly remembering what had happened before he’d lost consiousness, the red headed woman, now in a long gown, her hair swinging free down her back, looked upon him with a wicked smile. He’d never thought that wickedness was a real thing, and then, lifting the back of her hand, she savagely smacked him and he knew no more.

When he woke, the man was there again, and he said, “Listen to me, she likes to see suffering in the new ones she has made.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Carter,” the man said. He was of average height with a sharp, thin face, brown hair, ordinary enough looking, “And she, your maker, is Rosamunde.”

“I’m so thirsty,” Dan grasped at his throat. “I’m so thirsty. Please… Can I have some water?”

He was hungry now, desperately hungry, and not that stomach hunger, but the deep body hunger where temper flared and wooziness began, where your stomach meant nothing. But the thirst was greater.

“Water…” he rasped. “Please.”

There would be time to think of everything later, but this came first, and the man called Carter, unsmiling, stood up and rolled up his sleeve placing his wrist in Dan’s mouth.

Dan did nothing and Carter said, “Drink already, before she comes back. It’s as I said, she likes for her men to suffer.”

“I’m,” Dan said, spitting Carter’s wrist out though, for some reason he wanted it, “I want… Water..”

“Don’t be stupid” Carter said. “If you know what she is, and how could you not by now? Then you know what you are.”

He did, he realized, and as Dan realized it, horror crept over him. He had died. It was not untrue. He had been killed by a vampire and now he lived again. Carter pressed his wrist to Dan’s mouth and said, “Drink.”

The moment his jaws sank into Carter’s wrist was the most joyous moment he had ever know. It was the moment of becoming absolutely himself, of quenching hunger in a way he’d never done before. There was not even taste in his memory, simply fulfillment, simply drinking and drinking like drinking light until Carter said, “Enough,” and then, again, “Enough!” sitting back.

“It’s not enough,” Dan said, licking his lips and lying back, panting for more.

“Of course it isn’t. You would have to kill me to have enough. You will have to learn to kill.”

Dan Rawlinson realized before he understood what he had been told, that he was naked, and lying on something like a table. He looked around and started. There were other bodies.

“We are in a mortuary,” the man said simply. “Stenger and Stenger’s. Germantown.”

Dan turned his face in horror from the man who lay on the tray not far from him, and Carter said, “Why are you horrified? A few moments ago you were as dead as he is. You were not merely sleeping. You were a corpse, my good Daniel. Have been one for the better part of a day.”

 Dan nodded and he felt, suddenly, wise. There was no time to be scared. There was only time to learn, and certainly to not let on how much he learned.

“Who made me?” he said. “Who is she?”

“Rosamunde Court,” Carter said. “And you are part of her court now. She will tell you all. She has come to the land of Ohio to meet her uncle and his court and defeat them. You have been enlisted to her side and, I believe, will make a very good soldier.”

Dan was going to leave it alone, but chanced one more question.

“And who is her uncle? Another vampire I assume? I just… didn’t think of vampires as having family.”

“Drinkers,” Carter corrected. “And I doubt you ever thought of vampires at all. Her uncle is the Lord Kruinh. He keeps a house on an ancient site of power in a town now called Glencastle. With his bitch of a daughter, Tanitha. But soon all shall be set to rights, and you will be one of those who help set it.”