Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale

FRIENDS IN NEED

CONTINUED

When he slept he dreamed of the sun and the sandy white shore. He dreamed of waves like liquid glass that yellow sun shone through turning them blue and green and white as they curled and rippled over him like the spirits of 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. After the first feeding from Gabriel, he was expected to go out into the streets to kill and come back home.

The first time, he hadn’t killed. He had resisted his urge the whole night, feeling a hand that clawed him from the inside, ripping at his guts, making his veins burn. He’d gone back into his coffin, twitching and screaming, and as Carter had locked him in against the approaching day, he had been rocking and battering against its walls and lid. He heard Rosamunde say, “Do not worry. He will learn soon enough.”

Again that laughter from Evangeline, again his desire to kill her.

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. She was trembling. If he could say anything now to the girl bound to the stake in the center of the room, 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. 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.

In the sudden silence after the slavering sounds of him mangling the girl’s throat, Carter spoke.

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

Above his head, while he knelt on the ground with the dead girl in his arms, Rosamund spoke dispassionately.

“You are too young to not eat. Do not try that 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 Teddy 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.”

Up until the moment he had launched himself upon that girl, Sunny had felt powerful, more powerful ever he’d been before. He did not like to admit this, but he treasured his new sight and his new senses. These others did not seem to. There seemed nothing terribly powerful or happy about Teddy or about Tom. Even their names spoke of despair. Why had Rosamunde made them? But then, maybe Rosamundes reasons were different than Gabriel’s.

Gabriel came to him when the sun was about to rise.

“Stay with me,” he said.

“No.”

“Don’t you understand?” he said, reaching for Sunny’s hand while Sunny pulled away.

“Things will be different. This is only the beginning. We will be a great house, and you will be at the start of it, cunning, wise, beautiful. Only do not starve yourself. Do not do that again.”

 “I don’t want to kill people.”

Gabriel opened his shirt.

“Drink,” he said.

“What?”

“You haven’t hunted, and you don’t want to kill,” Gabriel said. “Drink.”

“I want no part of you.”

“What option do you have? If you had gone to bed with me, I would have had you drink from me as we made love, the old fashioned way, the most intimate way between Maker and Made, but you won’t have that. Even if you want it.”

While he spoke, Sunny felt his penis stiffening, but his anger would not allow him to go to Gabriel in that way. Instead, he gathered the other man to him and sank his teeth into his breast. He drank, and drank on, and the taste of Gabriel’s blood was the sweetest, most wonderful thing he had ever known. When he wasn’t doing it, he was disgusted by himself, but when he was doing it he was in ecstasy, and as he finished and Gabriel swooned in his arms, Sunny suddenly realized that Gabriel, weakened, would probably just go out and do the killing that he himself could not. In a sudden despair, his body hot with new blood, his emotions fallen to a new low, but his erection higher and stiffer, Sunny said, “Come on.”

“Come on?”

“Fuck coffins,” he said. “Take me to your bed.”

When he had read Dan’s frank journal, and when he had blushed knowing that Dan gave it to him knowing what he would read, the part where Dan kept fucking Rosamunde had semi confused Sunny, but it did so no longer. Gabriel had said there was a bond between Maker and Made, and like Dan and Rosamunde, this bond had been made in bed. So, in what he now understood as hatred mixed with sexual frustration, he sated himself with Gabriel. Gabriel had a terrible strength which he had not used that first night they were together, but now Sunny was strong as well, and there was a deep fury in both of them. One could fuck and hate at the same time, and the fucking was so much better. What was more, the shy part, the part that cared, the part that at Brad and Nehru’s apartment had worried about waking up their kid, was gone. Well into the morning Sunny bent Gabriel over, sweat dripping down his brow to his nose, onto Gabriel while he plowed him. Well past the usual time for sleep, the bed creaked and shouts and screams came from his room, They held onto each other, and the thoughts that rose in Sunny’s mind, that he had never been so close to someone, that he had never hated someone and been in a passion for someone so much at the same time, that this was the best sex he’d ever had, he pushed away. When Gabriel bit his chest or his shoulder and fed on him, he cried out because the pain felt like an orgasm. When he drank from Gabriel while plowing his ass, Gabriel howled, for it felt like climax. Apparently whatever went on in feeding, two vampires could drink from each other for a long time without needing to find fresh human blood. And when Sunny finally did orgasm it was a violent sunrise, one without dawn or gentlenss, a white and yellow explosion as, on the balls of his feet, he half fell from the bed while, he continued slamming into a Gabriel who was on hands and knees, his round buttocks holding Sunny’s cock an exploding prisoner while the younger man nearly lost consciousness.

In the dark that was surely day, lying beside Gabriel, Sunny spoke.

“What you did to Blake?”

“Blake?”

Sunny had momentarily forgotten that Blake was why he had come, and Gabriel had, in the last few days, forgotten their initial conversation.

“Oh, your friend.”

`   “Yes,” Sunny said, and he said it insistently, largely to cover up the fact that he had managed to forget Blake, “my friend.”

“Oh, he was never meant to be a Drinker.”

Sunny blinked at the casualness with which Gabriel spoke.

“He and the others who were found, they were practice, practice for Teddy and Tom, John and the others to learn how to kill.”

The sensation left Sunny’s face. There was no point in looking surprised or angry. These things were beyond Gabriel.

“They were people who looked like the people our new drinkers were used to being with, a test to see if they really could kill just anyone. And… they could. Also,” Gabriel went on, “they were a warning.”

“A warning?”

“To the others. To our enemies.”

“The other vampires?”

Gabriel raised an irritated eyebrow at that word.

“To leave a body lying around is not what we do. It upsets the balance, raises questions so…”

“You killed them and left them to upset your enemies,” Sunny said, “who are doing things the… traditional way.”

“Yes.”

So, of course, Gabriel was responsible for, if unsympathetic about, Blake’s death, but one of these dull young drinkers sleeping in their coffins had done it. And if Gabriel, who lived a very different life from common people, had no understanding of what this meant, then Ted did, Connor did, Tom did. They knew that a twenty-two year old kid with his life ahead of him had been taken in the night and killed just to be a hunting lesson. This was the answer to Sunny’s question, the end of his journey, and there was no meaning in it, no meaning at all.