Resurrection

Bonnie

The Other Side wasn't Heaven or Hell.

It wasn't a final decision. It was a waiting room; a dreary lobby created by a scorned distant relative to deprive supernaturals of an afterlife and have them instead exist on earth as phantom observers; to be in the world but not be of the world.

And this is where Bonnie had so many times voiced she would gladly go for the sake of the happiness and safety of her friends, behind the scenes of the living, who smiled, who cried, who made love and fought, who got to experience life while she subsisted in the shadow of it.

For three months she had convinced herself she was content following her loved ones, orbiting their lives, pretending their trials and tribulations were her own; it was make-believe, it was fantasizing color in a present of only gray.

She actually assumed she could continue on like this: months, years, centuries.

But then she witnessed the murder of her father. His throat slit from ear to ear.

And she stopped following the living; stopped imagining that the lives she watched were her own.

She was dead.

And the hopeless realization she was trapped with her loneliness made her state unbearable.

So when the gatekeeper, Elegba, found her; prostrate and broken at the gravesite of her Father, he bellowed she had a summoner and the ground underneath her began to seep blood in a circle around where she laid.

He presented the summoner's vow.

And she instinctively accepted, fastened her entire being around that promise; clung to each word and let it lead her out of the darkness.

BKBKBKBK

"This. Is. Klaus."

She blinks slowly up at him from her supine position, and before she recognizes him, before she realizes her savior has been her tormentor; he swiftly leans in, her lips grazing his stubbled chin and he slides his cold, broad hands under her bare thighs and neck, lifting her to her feet.

Only a breath between them, she squints at him, and the delicate skin between her eyes creases, and she sees the world for the first time. The Original Hybrid. His red lips, wide animated mouth, and his white throat. She concentrates on the thick red and blue veins traversing down the side of his neck, and how the knot at the center of his throat moves with each formulated sound.

"What is wrong with her?"

She looks down at the length of herself, her breasts and dark brown nipples, and naked arms and legs, she curiously runs her fingers down the firm middle of her chest, over the taunt stretch of skin at her stomach, and she glances up, her dark hair ashen from the dirt ground, curling over her shoulders, shrouding her oblique gaze.

He is staring at her. His blue eyes black in the torchlight.

"She been dead cher', give her a time. She a newborn."

The second voice came from behind her. The timbre was not as dark as his, and she tries to turn to look for the source of the voice but wobbles, and the hybrid pulls her closer to him, to where her body is pressed securely onto his. And her lips get caught on the cotton of his t-shirt as she attempts to make sound come from her own mouth; but what escapes is a raspy whisper of air. And she feels his fingers, holding the back of her neck, the nails digging into her flesh, and she moans, wriggles from discomfort, and the fingertips loosen their grip, and hesitantly, they begin to caress her, like the hand was unsure if it could touch her in such a way.

"She does not remember me."

His chest vibrates when he speaks; her ear is on his sternum and she is enchanted by the hollow deep sound; she can feel his voice in her own body, and she knows she is alive.