Bloodlust

Bloodlust Chapter Five

Chapter Five: Confessions from the family tree

We sat at the marble table that I’d been inspecting earlier, in the smooth leather chairs, sipping hot chocolate. I began to pour out my secrets to her- starting with the strange hunting dreams; the uncontrollable cravings for blood-all the way to the unsolved case of my parents murder. “You should be warned,” I told her between sips of hot chocolate.  “I may not be able to keep this stuff down.” She just looked at me quizzically. Not the response I was looking for. At the beginning, I half-expected her to run away screaming, threatening to call the cops if I didn’t get the hell out of there.

          She sat across from me, holding her coffee mug to her lips, eyes wide and nodding. I didn’t think she was listening at first, because of all the unnecessary nodding. But damn, was I wrong once again. She was actually a really good listener. Two points for Maggie, el-Zippo for the blood-sucker.

          As I concluded my story, in which I was gasping for breath at the end of, she set down her mug and folded her arms.

          “You know, Lex,” she began. “I remember awhile ago when your father was about your age. He and our father, your Uncle Tom, had decided to go camping for the weekend and something went wrong. Only a day after they left did that boy come home screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘Maggie, Maggie. Something happened to Dad while we were camping.’ At the time, I’d just stared at him blankly as he explained what happened. Or at least he tried to explain, through the gushing tears that kept rolling down his cheeks. Actually, it was a lot like what happened to you.”

          I shrank back into the leather as she continued. “He told me that they had been in the deeper end of the forest and they were arguing, like the morons they were, about how to start the fire. James had gotten so angry with your Grandpa Tom; something flared inside James, that he somehow attacked him. Tom’s entire body was shredded and bleeding rapidly. I didn’t know how to stop the blood from spilling…”

Her lip began to quiver so much that she had to stop and recollect herself. I grasped her limp hand tightly within my own. “Go on,” I told her.

          Maggie took a deep breath that blew her lips from the shade of dark purple they were turning seconds before, back to the regular peach color. “As I was saying, young James, who was only sixteen, had no idea what to do. So he did the one thing he thought would fix the problem: came to me. He hauled Tom’s drooping body into the back of their truck and brought him home. We called an ambulance and the police, but he was already dead.”

          That explains why he never talked about his dad when he was alive. He felt guilty. I shuddered as I thought of the numerous times we’d fought over the fact that I barely knew anything about his past life. “You never tell me anything! It’s like you want to keep me from understanding you. From what created me, who shaped my existence, and left a part of yourself within me. It’s wrong”, I would always say.

 “What happened to my grandmother?”

          She sighed heavily. “Ah, mother died at a rather young age. She got sick with brain cancer right after James was born. She and I had been best friends before she passed away.”

          So her death hurt you the most. More than my father or even my grandpa. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “I wish I could have met her.” At that moment, I felt a wave of helplessness. Like I couldn’t help myself or Maggie feel any better about our pasts. Like I wasn’t able to flush away all of the terrible memories down an invisible drain, to never be heard from again.

          “Everything I involved you in must feel like de’ ja vu. I’m not sure I feel comfortable staying here. I don’t want to make your life any harder.”