Blood Tint ~ Part 22

{Start with Part 1}

Blood Tint ~ Part 22

“Neave, I may have to leave. I don’t know if the hostel is going to be enough. I’m dangerous.”

I was dressed, and just stepped from the lift into Neave’s studio. It was only a week and the place felt old and comfortable. And like someplace I might not see again. Daci stood behind me, quiet, just there.

“Alak,” Neave replied, “I’ve seen your nightmares. They’re not that bad.” Her reassurance made me ache.

“No. You don’t understand. The nightmares are nothing. It’s the rest. I thought it was done a hundred years ago, but I was wrong-”

My tone was sharper than I’d intended. I paced, from studio to kitchen, letting my agitation out in the confined space. Neave knew I was serious, but not why.

“Tell me, Alak. Tell me what’s going on.”

“I was going to share all of this with you, over time, Neave. I thought we had more of it.” I stopped at the kitchen table and forced myself to sit down and face her.

“You know I was turned, and how being turned is different than being stricken.”

“Yes. You’re a soul short. But there’s more to it, isn’t there?”

“Yes. More to vampirism itself. The psychic component of it. You know that pleasure is as essential as blood to us.”

She couldn’t help but smile and nod.

“Pleasure isn’t always what nourishes a vampire. Depending on circumstances, personality, blind luck – none of us really knows, different vampires have required different psychic energies. Some – a minority – have fed on other of the most intense emotional states; rage, pain, horror. These vampires were the true monsters, and they were very real.”

“Among the Stricken,” Daci said, walking to a chair opposite mine and gesturing for Neave to sit between us, “maybe about a quarter of us were so afflicted. Most of them died quite terribly, by their own hand, or hunted down, or, in the next few decades in secret internecine wars of self preservation.”

“Daci was something of a warrior then, of necessity. The legends of Dracula have their roots in the leader of a coven of these.”

“The true roots of myth” Neave said.

“Yes,” Dacy said. “And some who survived far longer to taint history with their natures. Less than a handful of these vampires remain alive today. They have found places for themselves in the modern world with all its diversity of need. We,” Daci waved her hand to include me in the larger vampire community, “Tolerate them, allow them to survive, but it is a revoke-able contract, and they know it.”

“My maker, Chuluun, was one of this kind. It’d be convenient, but woefully cliché to call him a ‘dark’ vampire. When I met him, he was seeking a partner – perhaps an acolyte or apprentice for larger ambitions. He’d been visiting the temples at night, talking to novices and masters alike. I was an impetuous youth, a poor student, impatient, dissatisfied with Temple learning. I wanted romance and adventure, and was sorrowfully easy to seduce, Chuluun showed me the mystique of immortality, and gave me a taste of the wider sensory world when he first fed on me. It hurt. He made it hurt more than it needed to to feed himself, but told me it was part of the cost, and convinced me it was worth it. I’m long past being incredulous at my naïveté, but it was formidable. He concealed his nature to me until it was too late.”

I’d been looking at nothing in particular as I was talking. Peering into the past, I suppose. I turned to face Neave now, her expression serious, attentive.

“At the very least I disappointed him almost as much as he disappointed me. You see, while vampires of agony were the exception among the Stricken, for the Turned, they are nearly the rule.”

Neave’s eyes went wide.

“Our early history very checkered, Neave,” Daci said. “Some of us believed we could create immortal partners – grow entire communities, a rapturous civilization of our own, symbiotic with – but ruling – the rest of humanity, until they discovered that almost every created vampire was a horror to the world.”

“I was dead lucky. And yes, that’s an old, old joke. For whatever fluke, I did not become like Chuluun, and rebelled against him when he revealed his true self to me.” The memory of the very first girl he’d intended to be ‘mine’ flashed. I’d recoiled at what he expected me to do, and when he did it himself, he forced me to watch, so I could feed off her pain and be won over, even reluctantly. When I didn’t, he realized what had happened, though I could not know.

“We fought, and he left me for dead. Abandoned. I healed, though, because I was already changed. And hungered, and took what I needed to survive. I would not replenish myself the way Chuluun did – and didn’t know that I couldn’t even if I tried. I didn’t know what I did need, psychically. He never told me. I could hunt, and take blood, but half of me starved. It drove me mad, over a period of mere weeks, and I became, quite literally, a monster. I was the demon in Ayutthaya’s night. Naga, Night killer. For years… decades… I embodied nightmare legends of my people. I’d hunt, hide, kill, drink, and never be sated.”

Neave reached her hand for mine. I almost pulled back, but let her take it. There was a tear in her eye.

“Don’t pity,” I said. “It was a long time ago. It was how Daciana found me. I killed one of her crew.”

Daci nodded, looking into the past with me, though through a different lens.

“I was financing a French trade delegation to the Far East. I made passage with them, wanting to see the world. My quartermaster failed to return one night, and the dock hands and crew buzzed with talk of a ‘demon’s’ work. The stories, the atmosphere, were familiar, and I suspected If one of us was terrorizing this place, I felt something had to be done. So I tracked him down.”

I smiled darkly.

“She hunted me. And very well.”

{Continued in Part 23}