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

6. [Nicky] - 2003-2013, The Years to Come

"Hush," he said, and whispered to me about what had happened on that Saturday previous, while I had been sleeping in a prostitute's arms in Cyprus.

I think I spent that week respectably. Cannot be sure. I remember sucking on his thumb, and sleeping against his chest, and I remember his hand massaging my head. "I am going to take care of you," I said to him. Morning or evening? In the darkened guest room, I had lost track of the time.

He didn't say anything to that, but Laurent had always taken care of him. He had never been kind to Dasius when Dasius didn't need it, and had always been available to lecture him, to suffer him, to make him feel wanted by seeming so unwanted. There was between them so much vinegar that it made the rare sugar nearly too sweet in the mouth, the sort of sugar that brings tears to the eyes.

He had never felt alone in his entire life. Never. Lonely perhaps, lonelier than most, but never without a true north.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said, stroking my hair. "Don't try to be like him."

"Then I would be trying to be like you," I told him, too desperately.

The truth is that I do not make memories very well. Dasius says this is because I was made so young. But what I know I remember completely. 

The smell of orange cologne, and the harsh alcohol beneath it. The acrid smell of heavy metals, pulverized to make leaded face paint. The smell of kohl heating, and the eye pencil still hot in my hands even after Laurent had left us for the evening, and the taste that I loved, of blood in his mouth whenever he returned, when I kissed him. 

I am impulsive, quick to a sense of wrong and vengeance. This aside from the monster you all consider me to be. But I have no interest in your humanity and your morals. I have no interest in being ruled by a sense of what is right,  as lives in the eye of others' judgment. You are afraid to be judged. I am not. Laurent's death does not change this.

I have early memories of a warhorse, as thick and supple as any overburdened fruit, and sucking upon him as a witch sucks milk from sleeping virgins. Our horse in Rouen. I remember the rough bristle of his horsehair against my cheek, his terror of me, no higher than his breast. I remember the power there was in spooking him, of digging my fingers into his tense flesh, and the smell of his fright. And I remember discovering that the living smell this way as well, men, women, children, the old, when they are frightened by what they thought they understood. Myself, I do not think myself so ordinary anymore, and yet at first to the living I seem so benign. Warhorse, remember that I know that you forget that I have teeth. Remember that it is the living who do not guard against the unfathomable. It is they who are surprised. Do not make it so easy. I will be disappointed in you. Do not think that his death ushers in an era of peace and gratitude. What existed before, exists now.

I am bored of threatening you. I am tired. Does it feel empty, what I say?

Dasius, tired as well, whispered to me in bed, that solemn week we spent together in California, "Do you remember that sailor that he loved?"

"Which sailor?" I asked, curled against his body. His voice was clouded with sleep.

"The Dutch one, in, maybe four hundred years ago now."

" 'I could have spread him on a cracker', that one?" I asked, recalling vaguely what Dasius had once said to me about it.

"Yes, him. When Laurent made him, the sailor, he developed the biggest blood clot I had ever seen. In the abdomen. Laurent tried to get it out before he died but he died anyway. Laurent was all gore to the elbows. It was horrible. Gruesome."

"Yes, I remember him. You told me about it. What about him," I asked, spreading my fingers out over his throat. After a moment, I retracted them, to clutch his collar, and sucked on the fabric seam at his shoulder.