He caught my wrist mid-air and wrenched the spear from my hand. He hurled it across the room, embedding it so far into the wall that I wouldn’t be able to get it back out again with my own strength.
“I don’t think you care about Simone at all,” he said.
I broke down then in an incessant litany of sobs as I crumbled on top of him. Simone was the cord that kept me here, but even that was unraveling. Of course I knew she needed me. It would be wrong and cruel to leave her here, but if I was so useless to myself right now, how could I help her? Wouldn’t she be better off without me in the end? If she survived this one night, surely she’d find a friend to move in with. Surely I was the only thing that kept her life from improving.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she did see how lost and broken I was. Maybe she saw her sister had become a shell of moving parts and nothing more. Maybe she was just too kind to point it out.
The bargain I’d made with Gabriel was starting to feel as impossible to hold onto as a drifting cloud. Assuming we both kept our end and Simone got her medicine, that was only immediate survival. There would be another night after this and another and another. And the wait for day seemed to get longer each time no matter that the countdown clocks always started at the same number of hours. I couldn’t be the only one who felt it.
I wasn’t sure how Simone could be so optimistic. She was only a bit younger than me. It couldn’t be for lack of life experience. So was she the crazy one or was I? It seemed I was the only one who saw the world objectively as it was—an endless, pointless parade of shit.
I was so lost inside myself that at first I didn’t notice Gabriel stroking my hair. At first I didn’t hear the “Shhh shhhh”. It sounded like a calm fervent prayer to a distant god. It brought back the talk in the kitchen about the gods. I wondered if I should pray to Gabriel—if that might somehow make it all better.
I remembered the stories we’d read off the glass screens as children. I’d thought they were silly, but Simone had said she believed. We had so much technology around us, but in the end they were mere toys for a primitive species pretending to be advanced. We might as well have had sticks and stones and prayed to fire for how little we knew about the bigger questions of life and death.
The technology distracted us from our lack of answers to anything that mattered. It gave us a lesser form of magic to wield to appease us. But here, in the house with the wood and warm fire and paper books and no sign of advanced technology in sight—not a single cold white or silver appliance with sharp corners—was the real magic. Gabriel could have anything he wanted, and instead of gadgets and devices that whirred and spun and flashed and spit words out at people, he’d gone a different way.
If I let myself, I could fall into the peace of it, the stillness and solitude of the crackling and popping fire, the real solid physical things that seemed to give weight to my existence. But I didn’t know how to be in a moment and enjoy the simplicity and beauty it offered. I couldn’t stop the insistent feeling of guilt at even the idea of real happiness or peace inside the world as it was.
I managed to quiet the chattering in my mind to come back to the moment where Gabriel was still petting my hair, still saying “shhhh”. I cried through every thought that relentlessly tormented me. There was no cage Gabriel could put me in that could be any worse than the one I’d locked myself into already.
“It’s my fault they’re gone.” The words spilled out with no real thought to how they’d arisen in my mind.
“What?” His voice was still soothing. I couldn’t begin to imagine how he’d switched from rage to comfort in such a small beat of time. Maybe my suffering was so pathetic that it was impossible to maintain anger at me in the face of it.
And now I’d said those words. And he’d heard me say them. I sat on his lap, wrapped in his arms, trying to pretend I hadn’t spoken, hoping the moment would pass, and his question would wither away with it.
“Helene?”
He wouldn’t let the moment go in peace, and I was too emotionally drained to protest. And it seemed likely a part of my fatigue was keeping these thoughts not only from others, but from myself for so long. They had been in mental storage, in boxes and crates marked “Do not open”, “Fragile”. They should have stayed there.
“My parents. I wasn’t careful about the time. It should have been me, not them.” It had been nights and nights ago. I’d been careless, knowing but not yet comprehending the danger after dark. How unfortunate that I should learn that lesson in such a harsh way. Simone had been at home, waiting in the locked house. I was the only one who came back that night.
I still couldn’t forgive myself for surviving. She hadn’t blamed me. She’d been just about to reach the full flush of adulthood. Perhaps she hadn’t known to blame me. Or maybe she was in denial, and one day she’d wake up and realize I was the reason we had no family but each other. I almost welcomed her startled rage.
We’d mourned, and things had gone back to some version of normal. Simone had regained her will to exist in the world—flowering in spite of everything—but mine died with our parents. I’d existed, wearing masks of various sorts as the hours of our lives marched on. I’d smiled while my eyes were dead and laughed at things that weren’t funny. But I hadn’t been able to cry, not even as an act. It required far more thespian skill than I was qualified to display.
The first time I’d cried since my parents died was in the dungeon with Renard trying to whip me into oblivion. And now with Gabriel. I’d been afraid that if I started crying I might never stop. And judging from the events so far in the night, the theory had teeth. It hadn’t been safe to cry in front of Simone, or while at my work during the day hours. I might lose my job, or keep crying when I got home to my sister after each shift. I couldn’t lay that burden on her. She’d carried enough.
Gabriel’s strange home, far from the ugly fluorescence of the city, had been the first safe space to grieve.
He stood with me in his arms and carried me up a flight of stairs and down a hallway. I wasn’t sure if he was putting me back to bed—as if I could sleep off my dysfunction—or if he had other plans in mind. It was hard to know how he might think now was a time to make use of my charms, no matter what I’d previously agreed to or why.
But I wanted to know if he could make me feel other things besides pain and grief and anger.
When we reached his room, he sat me down gently on his bed and began to unbutton his pants. I looked away, not sure how to deal with the increasing expanse of male skin I was being exposed to. I wasn’t a virgin, but near enough to it. I’d dated a few men in the bright safety of day but had yet to be able to trust a relationship beyond that point.
What if he turned into a monster once night fell? It didn’t seem worth it to me, and I couldn’t understand the women who ran headlong into what I perceived as danger. My mother had been lucky with my dad. But what if I wasn’t so lucky? What if Simone wasn’t? She hadn’t paired off, either. But each day she seemed to get closer and closer to wanting to find a mate of her own. The instinct to avoid loneliness always seemed to outrun the instinct for self-preservation.
And if she did find someone, she’d no longer be my responsibility, and the last thing keeping me here would fly away.
Gabriel’s voice interrupted my inner monologue. “If one of my kind had done what you did downstairs, they would have been tortured and put to death. My kind is hard to kill, and it’s not a pleasant way to die.”
As if there were any pleasant ways.
How did he define what his minion had done to me in the dungeon? Gabriel’s threats and implied mercy held no sway over me.
He continued. “I’m going to punish you, but not right now. Stop trying to kill me. It will only earn you consequences.”
His hands hooked into my pants as he pulled me to my feet, then he unbuttoned them and shoved them over my hips and to the ground. The panties followed. He painstakingly unclasped each hook of the corset and tossed it to t
he side. He produced a key and unlocked the collar at my throat.
Was he ending our agreement? Had he decided to keep me at the house like the others? The idea of having to deal with all of those that came to the house and their various appetites was more than I could cope with. If that was his plan, he should go ahead and just kill me now. Even for Simone, I only had the will and energy for so much. I mean, I’d basically killed my parents, so why not finish off the rest of my family? It seemed a fitting end.
I shook that nasty thought from my head as Gabriel set the band on the table beside the bed. I couldn’t bring myself to ask him if he was changing things, if I’d lost his protection in the house. It wasn’t as if I expected him to defend me no matter what I did.
He pulled me flush against him, his warm skin pressing against mine. Just standing there, we fit together like interlocking pieces in a puzzle that had seemed mystifyingly complex only moments before. And now it was so simple.
Although he’d just scolded me, his expression held no anger, no contempt, no clear desire for revenge. Perhaps he could make his face appear any way he wanted, while his true thoughts lay under the surface. Maybe the moment I’d just witnessed with his mask slipping was more revealing than I wanted to believe. If he was too unhinged, then all this was pointless, and Simone would die for it. If she’d die anyway, the least he could do was kill me like I’d wanted from the start.
His large hand rested on the column of my throat. Then he took it away, and it was his mouth there instead. At first it was a soft, gentle kiss that I had to strain to remain aware of—like a butterfly’s wings beating against my skin—then it was a sharp sting that stole my breath as his fangs pierced the vulnerable flesh.
He growled softly as he drank. Images and thoughts and feelings about my parents’ death floated to the surface again. It was all sharp edges and burning pain…until it wasn’t. The edges blurred. The memories remained, but they started to feel distant, as if they’d happened to someone else a long time ago. It was a story I’d heard instead of a story I’d lived.
I struggled in his arms when I realized he was stealing from me. What right did he have to take my pain away? Without it, my life was a perpetual fall into nothing. They were the only feelings I could maintain, even if they’d burrowed so deep I often didn’t notice them anymore. But now I noticed their absence, and there was nothing to fit inside those spaces.
Even though it was done now, I fought against him, but he held me still while he finished feeding. He ran his tongue over his bite, and I knew it had healed just as my back had previously. No evidence of any of his crimes would remain behind.
When he stepped away, I’d planned to scream at him, to demand an explanation for why he felt he had the right to do that. Yes, I’d made an agreement with him, but I hadn’t known the full meaning of being his. I had assumed he’d fuck me, and once I knew his nature, I assumed he’d drink my blood. I had thought he might visit some level of sadism on me just because he could. But there was nothing that could have prepared me for him invading my mind, rooting around my thoughts, trying to control and manage my own personal narrative.
At the very least, I should have the right to my own thoughts and feelings. He shouldn’t be able to own even that.
But I couldn’t express any of this, because he’d moved to the bed, wrapped himself in a sheet, and started rocking. Tears streamed down his face. It seemed absurd that he knew how to cry. And why should he be able to when it had taken me so long to find even the first tear of my own?
I was still angry he thought he had some right to poke around inside my head and twist my memories around and mold and shape them so that he could more easily mold and shape me. But what he’d just done had a price.
It was as if he’d become me. These memories that were now distant—another person’s story—were his. The anguish on his face was real, the pain seeming to cut straight through him. And it occurred to me that the last thing I needed right now was a being as powerful as Gabriel carrying around the pain I’d learned to manage.
His eyes glowed again, and his fangs descended. His growl became a roar as he struggled out of the bed sheets. He grabbed them and ripped as if tearing the sheets apart was the only way he could stop himself from tearing me apart.
His gaze met mine, then he changed into a monster—a demon. Even those concepts had been scrubbed and sanitized in the stories of my childhood. This was the reality behind the cleaned-up version. He no longer looked even remotely human. He was huge—at least a foot taller, his muscles bulging impossibly large, fur growing everywhere. His fingers changed into sharp, hooked claws.
The mere glow of his eyes and fangs of before had been the civilized version of what he could become. It was the restrained result of ages of control. There didn’t seem to be anything inside of him any longer that understood language. He didn’t recognize me. He sprinted past me and practically flew down the stairs, out the front door, and into the night.
I stayed frozen at the top of the staircase, my gaze fixed on the open front door. Santo stood in the doorway staring up at me, a look of disgust on his face as if it were my fault Gabriel had lost all his sense. Feeling self-conscious and remembering my lack of clothing, I darted back into the bedroom and dressed.
I wondered if Gabriel had expected the transformation. It made sense he wouldn’t want to ruin his own clothes, but why remove mine? All I could think was that he’d had other plans, and this choice to take my pain as his own had changed the agenda. Maybe he’d underestimated what he was getting himself into.
I stared at the gold collar on the dresser for a long time and the key sitting just beside it. I was certain the collar had only come off because he’d wanted to feed at my throat, and it got in his way. It wasn’t a rejection or ending of our deal. At least I thought it probably wasn’t. I put the collar on and went back downstairs.
When I stepped outside, Santo glared at me.
“What did you do to him?”
He had a special kind of nerve to ask such a question. As if what they’d done to me didn’t matter at all. And from their perspective, I was sure it didn’t. My entire species was a source of food and amusement, like an adorable chick that grows up to become a chicken sandwich.
I ignored him and stepped out into the grass. We both knew he couldn’t touch me, and despite what Gabriel had done upstairs, removing pain wasn’t the same as replacing it with something else. The will to live is like a habit. When it goes away for a long time, even if the initial thing that took it away is gone, it’s hard to make it start back up again.
Maybe there was a phase two to Gabriel’s plan, but at the moment, I was nothing more than an empty vessel. Most of the poisonous contents had been poured out, but nothing new had been put in. I still didn’t have anything to live for beyond Simone. The world had not measurably changed.
And while the sharpest edges of guilt and pain over my parents had been drained out of me by Gabriel’s fangs, it wasn’t as if his bite had brought them magically back to life.
I remembered the hours and hours each night I’d stayed in the house with Simone while we tried not to go mad from our self-imposed captivity. It was exhausting having to pretend for her sake, when all I’d wanted was to go out into the night and allow whatever awful fate waited to claim me so we could end it and be done with the drama and suspense.
I’d thought…someday even those monsters we feared would grow old and have to hide in their own homes. They may be young and strong and vicious now, but that would be taken from them and they’d be reduced to the place Simone and I had always lived in.
That was when I’d thought all the monsters were human and that there was possibly even the mildest hint of fairness in the world.
The cottages on the property were lined in a semi-circle at the back of the house with a huge expanse of rolling green hills in between. Trees were scattered in among the cottages themselves, but none were in the middle. I went to the center-most point, the mo
st open area I could find, and lay down in the grass, looking up at the stars overhead.
It wasn’t much, but this moment was the most free I’d ever been. To be out in the open in the night was a decadence I’d only imagined before now—though I could have done it at any time. But there would have been a price.
Here, there was no price.
Chapter Four: 986 hours until day
I don’t remember drifting off. My previous nap had been only that…a nap. The crushing weariness I’d lived with had finally been given an opportunity to express itself. Nobody slept through the whole night. No human could sleep that long. But I felt at that moment as if I could make a noble effort toward that goal. If I could, life would become so much simpler.
I might have slept much longer if someone hadn’t sat beside me, nudging me back into the world as it was instead of the world I dreamed and hoped for. Sometimes I wondered how we could think one set of experiences—waking—were more real than the experiences of sleep. It was all a conscious experience. And everything was meaningless anyway. So why make the unappealing reality the one that must be real by default? It had to be an inborn masochistic urge of my species. There was no other explanation.
Gabriel was quiet as he lay down beside me. I shifted to see him staring up at the stars. He didn’t look like a monster anymore. Not even the glowing eyes or fangs remained. He looked like a person now, and for a moment, I could pretend I’d had a psychotic break and hallucinated the whole thing.
It didn’t seem as if he planned to explain it. I don’t think he believed he owed me an explanation. I’d already known those that ruled the night and this city must be monsters. It didn’t matter if the reality was even more literal than I’d assumed.