The Blood: A Denouement

“Do you want to see England?”

“Yes.”

The camera swooped over a general scene of limestone townhouses, grey sky and black cabs, skyscrapers and then back to Dan’s face.

“I was hoping for a little bit more than that,” Loreal said, sitting on her bed in Long Lees.

“Loreal,” Laurie’s face came into the Skype picture “We will take you to England. The three of us can come here. For fun. Not on a vampire spying mission.”

“Vampire spying missions sounds like so much fun!” Loreal said.

“Do they, really?” Laurie looked at Dan who looked doubtful.

“Well, it sounds like a band from the 90’s, now that I think of it,” Loreal reflected.

“Are you still talking to Loreal?” Loreal heard Tanitha’s voice in the background. “You should have just brought her.”

Laurie frowned and said, “Wait a second…”

He got up.

“Did you fly?” Loreal asked Dan while Laurie was talking to Tanitha, “or did you… fly?”

“What?” Dan screwed up his face, and then he laughed.

“Oh, no, we took a plane. The Atlantic Ocean is a lot of flying any other way.”

“I hadn’t thought about that.”

“With not too many places to stop.”

“Where are you all? Now?”

“They’re about to leave me in this fancy townhouse,” Dan said, rolling on his back. “They are going to… Rosamunde’s castle.”

“You came all the way to England to be left in a townhouse?”

“Not alone. Myron is staying,” Dan turned on his side and poured another glass of champagne... um, no. Prosecco. “I’m not complaining. Apparently after what happened with Evangeline, they thought I might kill Rosamunde.”

“Because she was your maker?”

“Yes. I… I haven’t seen her since I escaped her. Myron feels responsible. He wants to meet her. I think he’d try and kill her, and Tanitha wasn’t having any of that, so she made us stay back.”

“And you obeyed.”

“You don’t not obey when Tanitha says something.”

Loreal grinned and she said, “I wondered if the reason they kept you back was Evangeline too.”

“I think it was, actually. Evangeline changed me.”

“But didn’t Kruinh order you to kill Evangeline?”

“It wasn’t exactly an order, and I wasn’t exactly unwilling, and they say that once you’ve done a thing you get a taste for it.”

“Is that true?” Loreal said. “When you kill you get a…. well, that’s dumb of me. I mean, you’re a vampire, you must be good at it. Both of you. But Evangeline. Did you like killing her?

“Like is a funny word,” Dan finished his glass of prosecco and reached for the cheese.

“But did you?”

After a moment, Dan said, “Yes.”

“Did it take you so long to answer because you didn’t know it, or because you didn’t want to admit it.”

“Maybe… a little of both. You know, I’ve only been a vampire for a few years? So much of what I am surprises me. Scares me a little. Sometimes I wonder if I’m losing my old self and becoming…”

“A monster.”

“Yes. Yes, actually. Maybe I’m already a monster.”

“Well, luckily, I’m a witch, so I’m not that afraid.”

Dan sighed and tossed a grape across the room before moving so fast he caught it, and returning to the bed.

“Fuck! When I say I’m afraid, I’m turning into a monster, I’m not really joking, Loreal.”

“No,” Loreal returned. When I say I’m not afraid of you, and I won’t let you be, I’m not joking either.”

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.”

“I chose you because you longed for death and your old life was at an end,” she said.

Rosamunde lay on a great chaise lounge piled high with cushions, in a richly appointed room. For some time she or better her servants, had dug a tunnel into the morgue of Stenger and Stengers and kept apartments underground and in the old building next door. When it was time to leave this land, she would take them down and be on her way, but right now, in the land of night, amidst curtains and stain glass Tiffany lamps, she lived in luxury.

“I know I am not wrong,” Rosamunde said. “I have a feeling for such things.”

She said she always had this feeling. That she had made a few drinkers before, but now she would make a large household of them. She even said that this was not normally done, but there was no time to waste. She had made Carter.

“But he wanted it. He was done with his earthly life. You were done, but you didn’t know it.”

“How do you know I was done?”

“You said it. You talked freely. You came to me willingly, more willing than you know. Eileen cheated on you with Craig. Myron was so successful and had a family. He made life work. You’d been trying for almost thirty years and it still wasn’t working. You were done with that old life, so I gave you a new one and for that,” Rosamunde bowed her red head, “you are heartily welcome.”

He could scarcely believe her, but rather than be enraged, he listened to everything she said. He learned how, like Carter, and like Martin the other one who was out now, he would go out and kill every night and return in the day. If her expectation that he return at the end of the night seemed far fetched, then he had to account for the fact that he would not be able to survive without killing or in the daylight, Young drinkers were like children, and the only hope for them at the beginning was other drinkers.

Graciously, like a queen, she allowed him to drink from her. He was still naked and had not even noticed it.

“Leave, Carter,” she told him and Carter did.

“You may come to bed with me,” Rosamunde said,

Looking back it only seemed practical that he obliged her. He spent the rest of the night learning the intensity of vampire sex, expending his fury on her, and they passed out toward the morning.

“Carter was never a very good lover,” Rosamunde murmured, stroking Dan’s hair.

“You are handsome and wild, and you will do quite well. Tomorrow night you will go out on the hunt, and learn how good the true kill feels.”

As he fell asleep he knew he’d loved the sex. He knew he’d had sex with women he didn’t particularly like before and he knew he had gained, by fucking her, something like trust. In that vampire night that was the day, he fucked her several more times, understood what he would understand later which was that, even though she had killed him, he was hypnotically attracted to her. When he left that night, supposedly to go on the hunt, he knew he could not come back for the simple reason that if he stayed he would be her slave and forget himself entirely.