The Beasts: A Winter's Tale

“Even though it’s cold as hell outside, at least it’s warm in here,” Lewis said.

Chris, lying nude while Lewis ran his fingers over his back, laughed into his pillow and said, “It is more than warm in here. This is the hottest apartment in the world.”

“Well, we’re always naked in it,” Lewis turned over on his side contentedly, and looked out of the sunlit window. “So does it matter?”

“We need to get our sleep,” Chris pressed his face into Lewis’s back. “You and me. Tonight we meet with Kruinh. Tonight you meet the Family.”

“More than I’ve already met?”

“Yes. And Kruinh wants to discuss things with you.”

“It has been a long while.”

“Then you remember?”

“I do. It came back to me little by little, and maybe he wishes to discuss old things. It has been centuries since I spoke with him last. In fact, it was before I died the first time you knew me as Melek. Before he made you. I have not seen him since then.”

“Something is going on in our world too,” Chris said, “the vampire world. Something is going on with us the way it is going on with Kris Strauss and his werewolves.”

“Well,” Lewis rolled over on his back, “not that I want to discuss this when we could be sleeping or having sex, but we’ve said already that things are happening, things we do not completely understand.”

“Only,” Christopher said, turning to him and touching his cheek, “I feel that now that you are who you are, there will be many questions from many people, and the one who will be expected to have the answers will be you.”

Jim had left his door open and was raising himself up to stand on his head when Marabeth entered.

“You and that Jason guy have a good time last night?” he asked offhandedly.

“Yeah,” Marabeth said with equal carelessness. “We had a decent night.

“Morning yoga?” she said as he lowered himself to his shoulders and then lay on his back and curled into a sitting position.

“It stops me from being crazy,” Jim said.

It also makes you fit as fuck, Marabeth observed, but thought this would embarrass her shirtless cousin.

“And,” Jim said, going into a Downward Facing Dog, and then walking his feet to his hands, “reading that woman’s book definitely made me need to do yoga.”

“Are you going to read more of it now?”

“I don’t think so,” Jim said. “I got to when they’re in America and—”

“I only got to her leaving Germany,” Marabeth said. “I was going to give it a go again. I think I can stand it. I think I actually … want to know what happens. I feel stronger now.”

“Well, you are strong. You’re always strong,” Jim told her.

Stretching himself up on his toes he said, as he reached for the sky, “You’re the strongest Strauss I know.”

Marabeth made for the book on the bed and said, “I don’t know if that’s true.”

Jim settled onto the bed in his Lycra shorts, his chest wet with sweat, and moved the back of his hand over his forehead.

Marabeth said, “If I went to meet this woman named Eve Moreland, a woman who I think knows a lot about our family, would you go with me?”

“Sure.”

“I didn’t even tell you who she was.”

Jim shrugged.

“Does it matter?”

She went down the hall. Marabeth didn’t really wish to think about anything else that had happened the night before. She would have to deal with it all, obviously, but for the moment the most important thing was to press on, and she was sure that there would be no real pressing on until she read the book. Or at least read more. She placed the journal on the bed and then went downstairs.She thought about going upstairs, but then imagined that Kris probably wasn’t there anyway..

She could hear the house waking up, and she wished she’d kept a coffee maker in her room like she used to. Before she had been afraid to go back to her lonely apartment, and now she wished she was there, didn’t really want to be with her family today. Joyce had brought her here, and right now Joyce was probably in bed with Peter, something Marabeth’s mind rejected every time she tried to imagine it. The trip back home was as simple as taking the Number 8 up Demming Street, and that might happen later, despite this cold.

But… Jason.

Not that Jason wasn’t worth it, but this wasn’t like her, and she suspected it wasn’t like him. Still, thinking about him and last night was a distraction from thinking about the book which, as she sat, not on her bed, but in the old chair in the corner of her large old bedroom, Marabeth resolved to read now.

“I wished we’d flown,”Lewis commented.

“That wouldn’t even be practical,” Chris noted as they walked down Ogden Avenue.

“But it’s so exhilarating. I have to say,” Lewis told him, “out of all the boyfriends I’ve ever had, and all the rides I’ve ever taken, riding on your back over the city of Chicago at the speed of… well, not light, I guess you’d call it the speed of vampire, is the greatest.”

“It’s a cold snap. You would be freezing if we did that tonight.”

“I’m freezing now,” Lewis noted, and then Chris Ashby stopped.

Lewis did not ask what the matter was, because now Chris walked differently, quicker, his senses obviously turned on, and Lewis thought, “He is on the hunt,” and then Lewis knew that the reason they had not flown was because, in one way, Chris knew he would be on the hunt.

“Did you hear that?” Chris asked unnecessarily, Lewis thought, because of course he hadn’t. He followed Chris for a moment, but then Chris raised a finger, and he went down the street and through an alley.

He was getting used to this. He told himself that every time after it happened. Being beaten was getting to be commonplace. But Willis must have known that, because he would never let it be boring. He wouldn’t let it be the same. He always changed it up with some variation of torture. Lately he’d figured out that the cold was a good place for a beating, the cold and the threat that you just might not be allowed to come back in, so here he was, out by the trash cans throwing his hands up as a shield, with no coat, in tee shirt and jeans, almost burning with the cold. He didn’t pray anymore. He had been prayed out.

“Don’t you goddamn put your hands up. Don’t put your hands up. You gon feel this, little niggah! You gon”—hit—“fuckin’”—hit—“feel this. You little worthless motherfucker. Who do you think you are? You ain’t shit. You black, you ugly, you ain’t got shit to piss in or lay down on but what I give your ungrateful—”

And then it was gone. It seemed like absolute silence, being sucked into soundlessness for a moment, and so it took a bit to realize that there were sounds, the sounds of the street, cars passing, the wind blowing, the sound of feet coming down the street and down the alley, but it was the sound of Willis that had stopped.

And then the boy looked up, Willis was pressed against the wall, the studded belt hanging from his hand, and most certainly there was a white man, with pale blond spiked hair in a leather coat who was, by all indications a vampire, quietly sucking the life out of Willis’s throat.

As he released Willis, and the dead man slumped to the ground, Chris turned to the boy, his mouth red and, long white teeth tinged red, he spoke.

“I hope you weren’t too attached to him.”

Now Lewis had come down the street, and his eyes went from the boy to his boyfriend to the dead body.

“He won’t kill you,” Lewis said, “though he probably shouldn’t have killed your… whatever he was… in front of you.”

“He was my mom’s boyfriend,” the boy said. “He was a motherfucker.”

“Kids shouldn’t swear,” Chris said in genuine disapproval as he wiped his mouth and Willis’s dead body thudded unceremoniously to the alley gravel.

“Dude,” the boy said, “you just killed somebody.”

“Do you want to go back to your mother?” Lewis said.

“She’ll just beat me too. And then find someone else like Willis.”

“Well,” Chris murmured.

“I guess you’re coming with us,” Lewis said.

“For real?”

Chris looked to Lewis.

“Are you sure?”

“You just killed his mother’s meal ticket right in front of him.”

Chris said, “Lewis, you’re not exactly… into children.”

“I’m not a child.”

“You are,” Lewis said. “Do you have a name?”

“L’varion.”

“Is that one of those names with the apostrophe where it shouldn’t be?” Lewis asked. “Never mind. I’ll call you Levy. Come with us.”

L’varion, now called Levy, nodded, and then Lewis said, “You need a coat. Should we go back to your house?”

Then Chris Ashby said, “If we’re doing this, we’re doing this.”

He bent over Willis’s dead body, and without much care, wrested him of coat, gloves and hat, handing the oversized winter wear to a boy whom he suspected was undersized and underfed for his age.

Levy dressed and Lewis assisted then said:

“Now, let’s go.”

Chris headed up the alley first, and the boy walked beside Lewis.

“Are you going to turn me into a vampire?”

“Not tonight,” Chris shouted before Lewis could say anything, and they headed back onto Ogden.