The Story of the Vampire, L (Completed | Featured )

Part 15 - Ravager

Mini, listen awhile. Come closer. Do you hear me? Am I speaking? Softly. Tell me about my child. Does the blood ravage you? Speak to me. Mini, I like the color of your hair. It is so red. Oh save us, don't cry. It ravages you. Do you know now what power is? Do you understand that to him you were as nothing? A small thing. Weak, so small. Don't cry, little doctor. Be strong. It is cool here. All will be as sweetness and the pleasure of security. Cry if you must. I will lie beside you.

Your maker, your Laurent, spread my blood thin over the continent before he came to you. You are all pale shadows to me, weak blood. A flick of my fingers, a blink of my eyes, what are you? Nothing. 

Kiss you. If I do that, your young gentleman will be angry. I think that I will not. Taste you? I will not do that either. In your frail body is the blood of my child, and I would not have it. No. Oh, hold me. You smell like that tea. It is in your hair. You are touching my pins. What is the matter with you children, wanting to see me so undressed? Let my hair down if you must. 

Your maker used to dress my hair. Do you know that? Before he died, every evening he was coming into my room, without a word, and sitting me at my vanity. He would put my pins between his lips, and braid my hair, and roll it. Even when he was trembling, he would come. Often, he would not say a single word, and go when it was finished. Other times, he would press his soft lips to my temples, and whisper to me in our Latin and Egyptian patois, drag his fingertips up my throat and the back of my neck, to feel my shiver at the tingling of my skin. He would breathe at my hairline, and kiss delicate places, places where teeth might puncture with barely any pressure at all, and say "Faya, look on me. Faya, speak to me." He liked to stroke the back of my neck as you do now, because it made me tremble, a vulnerable position. As I tremble now.

Your maker. Yes I say that. How many hundred times did he insist to me that Escha was dead? So many times I called him by the wrong name, and he exhausted himself trying to beat me with his fists. He insisted upon "Laurent", but this name makes me ache. How your stomach trembles when I touch it.

Egypt. 

The previous evening had seen him swept up in a rabid fury with me, but it was all act by then. He had exhausted himself on fighting, and had sunk down into a terrible melancholia, which he could not hide from me, and I hurt for my gone lover, who when Escha touched me, your maker, my Escha, always, not Laurent, Escha, would touch me like a lover, it was as if he put his hand inside my body and picked at pieces of my soul, my self. 

Was there any one thing? No. But I woke up in the sultry evening, and he was sleeping, beside me. I went to the window, and it was all black night, half a white moon lighting silvery wisps of fall clouds, and when I breathed in the air it was like a cool blade slicing slowly through my body, as if breathing in a spirit. I held it inside of myself for a moment, and breathed it out again. 

Far away, barely visible over the horizon, was a sliver of white sail in the harbor, sliding past in silence. I turned around, and when I looked at my child, he was sitting up, awake, watching. And when I looked into his eyes, suddenly there was fear there, and instead of confusing me, I felt a pressure of anger in my ribs, blooming in me. What trick? I thought. Why should he be fearful? I breathed. I stabbed my finger at him, "Why are you afraid? Why do you treat me as a stranger?"

He was not used to my raised voice, and retreated from it, moving backwards up the bed away from me. 

"Why are you afraid?" I asked him, and his face was a blank horror of me, without words. "Speak to me," I said to him, "are you made a ghost already?" When I covered his body with mine, he covered his face, protecting the place where I had burned him with my pin and gasped as if I were strangling him. I said to him, "Are you still dreaming? Escha," and he began to cry.