Elysian Field

"Six feet under"

Chapter 1

               “ In which she survives a massacre, and yet somehow winds up six feet under.”

The truth is there's no way to start the night well if you have to convince your body to bypass the fact that it's clinically dead and start functioning.

Aaron had been doing this for about a century, and it had long since gotten old. He'd never really enjoyed it, and no wonder, but when he had been a younger immortal his mind had taken as much time waking up as his body, and so he'd never really resented the process.

Now he felt like he had to struggle against his numb limbs as his mind expanded out and away from him, through the walls of his crypt and up to the earth to scan the surrounding grounds of the Elysian Fields cemetery. He did it to occupy his senses more than anything else, but knowing what he was going to find once he rose from his coffin was certainly helpful.

He found, as per usual, the sole, lonely rumble of the cemetery caretaker's mind. Tonight he was thinking and turning over in his mind a poem.

It matters not how strait the gate

how charged with punishments the scroll

I am the master of my fate

I am the captain of my soul.

It was an interesting little fragment. Aaron sought curiously to find the rest of the piece, but the caretaker's mind kept thinking of that one, and he didn't want to push it around when there was no need.

His dead body began to remember that it was supposed to be moving around, and a faint tingle started cursing through his limbs, dancing on veins and vessels filled with thick stolen blood. His heart gave a single, solitary thump as if it hoped to be able to keep pumping, and then changed its mind.

One beat was enough. He only got one per night. There was a momentary pause as the magic that animated his body expanded out from his silent heart and reached down throughout his body.

Then everything flared brusquely to life, pain flaming across him as nerve endings received orders to immediately wake and muscles remembered how to move. Pain shot white-hot through Aaron's mind for a single moment before it subsided, leaving behind the faint pleasant tingle of life and the possibility of movement.

The vampire sighed, once again fully in control of his body, and pushed the lid of his coffin up and to the side as he sat up.

Aaron hated waking up. He thought it was a fatal flaw of design. If a vampire was forced to sleep through the entire day due to some misbegotten tradition, then so be it. But after being vulnerable for so many hours, it would have been only intelligent to wake immediately and with full possession of one's senses, instead of dumbly weighted down by the uselessness of an unresponsive cadaver.

He paused as he pulled on a shirt, thinking that cadaver was a rather strong word for his body. Then again, if there was no pulse and no breathing and it emitted no heat, then it certainly was a cadaver. Other words for it sounded just as harsh; corpse, carcass, remains, stiff. Well, maybe remains sounded better. He certainly wasn't stiff, not once he got over all that rigour mortise business. That had been unpleasant.

It might have been better, had his actual maker been around to give helpful advice. But Aaron was a vampire orphan. Not to sound like a Charles Dickens novel, his first few years as a vampire had been admittedly miserable. Eventually, he had been able to focus his mind and act rationally over the storm of blood and madness that his mind had become. As soon as he could arrange it, he had contacted his father's lawyer passing himself as a friend, told him Aaron was dead, and had him request for the coffin to be sent to Chicago to the family crypt.