A Foreboding Allure

Chapter 5 - Part V

Notes from the Author;; This last section of Chapter five is dedicated to LJHron.  She has been a faithful reader and commenter on "A Foreboding Allure" all through the uploading process.  Thanks for being such a great supporter! (: Much love, x.

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Dante's POV

It had been almost two days since I had spoken to or seen anyone.  I hadn't even gone to check on Liana.  For it was her that had my mind in such an uproar.  Something about me was different when I was with her.  Being with her made me remember what it felt like to be human - she made me feel that way.  And then when she had gotten upset and barred her neck to me, daring me to feed from her, it was like I had been slapped across the face and brought roughly back to reality.  No matter how many times I now could admit to myself and to Liana that I didn't want to a blood thirsty, murderous monster, when it was time to lay the cards on the table, I couldn't change the hand I was dealt.  And so the realization of it all became too much for me to handle, and I reverted back to my previous method of solitude.  In the library, surrounded by dusty books, and whatever spiders happened to be lurking within their brittle pages.  

Normally, I was only one who ever came into this room.  My mother hated the dirt, and my father, the darkness.  Like many other rooms in our house, the windows were boarded up.  Not because of the myth that vampyres had an aversion to sunlight but because of my families ever present paranoia that someone would discover us.  Both Nadia and Lorenzo had already read all the books in the library backwards and forwards so that was another contributing factor to their lack of interest in my favorite wing of the house.  Sonya, had her own collections of books in her room should she ever decide to read them and Antoine, well, I was surprised he was even literate at all, considering I had never seen him so much as turn in a page in our entire existence.

The library was entirly mine.  Except today.  Today, I felt as though the sacred solitude that the library offered was somehow broken, as an trance becomes disenchanted once eye contact is broken.  There were dust-free spots, a long the spines of several of the shelves, as though someone had taken a finger and dragged it slowly across the titles, searching for a particular volume.  I would never have done such a thing, as I knew easily where every interseted book was placed in the large room.  A few books were pulled off the shelves, stacked in a pile on the floor.  "Myth and Folklore of the Western World", "Aesop's Fables", and "Gray's Anatomy".  And odd selection, in my opinion. Whoever had been rummaging through the texts obviously had quite varied interests. 

I tried, with difficulty, to suppress my annoyance that the library's most recent visitor didn't have enough respect for the written word to replace the already dusty and neglected volumes back on the shelf.  I sighed, chose to see the positive side that at least someone in the house was trying to educate themselves and began putting the books back on the shelves.  I took a seat again in my maroon leather chair put I found myself up once again pacing the floor.  I had shut myself off from the outside world for two days to think about things and try and take a breath from all the excitement of the house but I was beginning to worry about the state of the union so to speak.  As far as I knew, Antoine was still missing in action and Sonya, well that last time I had talked to her she was extremely emotional. While an emotional Sonya was not uncommon, the circumstances had me worried.  So with that I left the library and headed straight to Sonya's room.  

When I reached the door, I walked in, only remembering after I had opened the door that I had entered before knocking.  It was this fact that made me extremely grateful that my sister's room was in fact empty.  When Sonya was in a normal mood she was very...promiscuous, so it was always best to take precautionary measures before going into her room.  I looked around carefully, under furniture, in closets. A part of me was terrified I would somewhere find Lucca's slowly decaying body stuffed away.  She never mentioned what she was going to do with the body.  When I was finally satisfied that neither Sonya nor her lover's corpse were in the room, I came to the conclusion that maybe she had gone to bury him.  Despite her vampire qualities, Sonya was still a much younger vampire than all the others in the house which meant that her humanity was more surfaced than a more mature vampire's would be.