Part One - Gabrielle
Southern California, Present Day
My eyes flew wide open and I found myself staring out in total darkness. When I took my first wakening breath, the air was heavy and felt extremely ragged when it went into my lungs. Even though I could hardly fit in this coffin-like resting place, I had felt very comfortable until I had woken up from my deep sleep. In here, I had everything I needed: my black fluffy pillow. This particular night I didn’t feel well rested enough to end this gorgeous state of unconsciousness. I must have been out for at least twenty-four hours but still all that sleep didn’t satisfy me. No movement came over my body as I tried to go back to my happy place and when I heard a male’s heavy breaths, it forced me to stop those plans. Instead of going back into my weariness, I used some of my strength to force the lid of my coffin open. I lifted my upper body and looked around the big and open room. When I gazed towards the window, my eyes found what they were looking for. My joints were rigid, so it wasn’t exactly pain free to get up but after I threw my legs over the edge, the rest of my body came swiftly along with them. The difference of the temperature was momentous. It could barely be 60 degrees in the room! All I wanted to do was crawl back down into my special place but the man by the windowpane was making it impossible. I went the twenty feet that separated us and put my arms around him.
“Slept well?” I whispered in his ear.
I could feel his smile but he did not turn around. He kept staring out in the black night. Or was it early morning? I couldn’t tell yet with my eyes still clouded with sleep.
“As always. You?”
He had a very soft cling to his voice this day, which meant that he’d had an excellent day so far, however I could hear that it was still drowsy. Though his voice was naturally light, the strength and of it couldn’t be denied. It screamed authority and self-confidence, which his face also did. His face. His gorgeous, gorgeous face. He had still not turned in my direction, but I had seen his face so many times that I didn’t need a reminder. I closed my eyes and saw before me his short blonde hair; his substantial eyebrows that rested over his light brown eyes, with long blonde lashes to protect them; his slightly marked cheekbones and his small mouth, with plumed lips that had a somewhat deeper color than the rest of his pale face. For the first time since I had woken up, I smiled. When I opened my eyes, Ray had turned around in my arms and now stood and gazed right into my eyes.
“What were you dreaming about?” he asked with curiosity. ”You were so far gone for a while.”
“You of course.”
He fired off a broad grin at the sound of my vaguely bruised voice. After all the years together, I couldn’t understand why he didn’t have the capacity to read me better.
“I should’ve guessed” he said still smiling.
After a minute of silence he put his hands over mine and squeezed them gently. His touch washed away some of my anger, so I didn’t pull away when he moved closer to my body. I could never stay mad at him for long, so as I always did, I leaned in and rested my head on his chest. He was very tall, which meant that my head only reached as far as his heart, but that was alright with me. By now I was so used to it that I didn’t even think about it anymore. Underneath his pale skin, I could feel the slow rhythm of his heart, beating in a steady pace. After a light sigh, I closed my eyes.
After ten minutes in the same position, Ray stroked my hair back and slowly moved my head from his chest. In protest, I made an angry grunting noise. I could have listened to his heart until noon. But the disappointment from being pushed away did not last long. Swiftly, Ray moved his hand from my hair to my check and down to my chin. With light fingers, he tilted my head upwards. The glitter in his eyes when they met mine was very powerful. I stood up on my toes and found Ray’s lips. A night without him had made me unusually forward and before I knew it I had my hands behind his neck in a tight grip and my lips were parted. With firm hands, Ray loosened my grip and moved away to the other side of the window. I felt a jolt of rejection going through my cold, slow beating heart. By now, I should be used to this. It was always the same story with me and Ray. A few brief kisses, which he only went through for my sake, were all I had been giving during these 32 long years that we had spent together. For some reason, he had lost his ability to be intimate after his transformation. Like something had been lost in the process. The weird thing was that we still hadn’t figured out why this had happened and how to make it disappear. A dry sob came from deep down in my throat and the despair felt worse than it used to.
“I’m so sorry. You know that I want to, but… I don’t know what I can do to ease your pain.”
Slowly he moved closer to me again and took my hands in his, a maneuver even he enjoyed. My voice wasn’t strong enough to give him an answer so I moved my eyes from the floor to outside the window. Soon, the morning would come and that made me feel a little better. In a few hours, it wouldn’t just be us two alone anymore, which would distract me and help the pain to slowly fade away and create another hole in my soul. But on the other hand, I couldn’t be in the possession of such a pure thing as a soul. And neither could the despicable humans walking this earth. If hate was the strongest expression of dislikement, it wouldn’t be enough to describe my feelings towards humans. They were a race beneath us that didn’t deserve our attention. After all the human lives that I had ended during my time, I no longer felt any form of compassion towards my victims. When Ray squeezed my hands again, my dark thoughts disappeared like fog on a summer’s day. My brain was now clear and there was only one thing that occupied my mind.
“Let’s go hunting.”
When we came back to the condo, it was already seven-thirty. The hunt had not taken more than 90 minutes and I should feel happy with that. But that was out of the question. Our attempt to find two strong healthy humans to feed of hadn’t gone by as smoothly as we thought. The woman had been easy for me to slay. I had just walked up to her, caught her gaze and the grey eyes had gone blank in less than a second. After that she was completely powerless. The problem was when Ray had gone after another human, a man that had followed my victim for several miles. What a creep. He seemed harmless enough and easy for Ray to bring down, but he appeared to be immune to Ray’s powers and with a frightening face, he took out a knife. In a reflex move, I let the body in my arms fall cold and dead to the ground and ran quickly over to the knife bearing human. He had his arm up, ready to strike Ray and the rage filled me up so completely that I couldn’t think about anything else than about this human’s death. Before I was by his side, the low creature had sliced through Ray’s pale chest with one swift move. I lunched at him with all of my force and knocked him over so he fell hard on the stone pavement. In a swift move, I cracked his neck and bent down to claim my reward. But when the first drops of blood touched my lips, my head flexed upwards and I almost threw up. After two deep breaths I found the strength to talk to Ray who was now standing to my right.
“He’s…sick. I think it’s HIV.”
Some diseases, like Hepatitis B and HIV, any blood related illness really, were in fact extremely dangerous to our kind. HIV affected us the worst as it broke down our capacity to turn human blood into venom inside our bodies. If you only drank as much as a handful of the infected blood, you wouldn’t be able to feed for at least a week, which meant pure starvation.
“Are you okay? Do you feel sick?”
His concern and those horrified eyes. I had had seen them one too many times.
“Well, I didn’t drink any of his blood. It tasted horrible. It was like nothing I’ve tasted before”
I looked over at the dead woman thirty feet away.
“Her blood is still fresh. Drink it, you need it.”
I looked at his chest which was covered in venom flowing out of his body that was only beginning to heal the deep wound. Ray was quiet for a while and I saw him debating inside himself what the right thing to do was. He glanced at my face one more time, but it didn’t help him decide. My mind and face were both blank. His left hand stroke off some of the sticky venom and then his thirst won the battle.
”Are you okay? You have that look again.”
I blinked hard and was back in current time. He stared at me for a while and then said in a smooth voice:
”You didn’t get enough food. And it’s my fault…”
I tried to keep my feelings locked inside, but I could feel the irritation building up.
”Don’t worry about it, I’m fine.”
”You’re only saying that to calm me, but I know that you…”
”Stop it!” I saw the words hurting him, but that only made me madder. ”It wasn’t your fault it was the despicable human. I really do hate his kind. Humans don’t have one good reason to carry weapons and hurt other people, but we on the other hand…”
Now it was Ray’s turn to interrupt me.
”No more lectures on how fantastic we are and how insignificant the human race is, I beg you.”
Ray had never shared my thoughts on humans. Actually, he considered them to be very interesting. My burning eyes tried to stare him down but it was worthless. All he had to do was to give me one cold stare and I knew that I could never beat him. If humans were weak, he was the total opposite. I had never met any human or other being that could make me feel so small. When his gaze became too much my eyes flickered to the brown wooden floor.
”I need to take a shower”, I said in a plain voice.
When he was like this I couldn’t stand to be in his presence. I turned around to walk to the bathroom when Ray took a steady grip on my arm.
”Don’t walk away from me! I hate it when you do that.”
My eyes were tired when they met his and I could see that he was angry, very angry.
”I have nothing more to say to you at the moment.”
I could see that there was only one way to settle this argument: to lie.
”I know that you’re only worried about me but I’m trying to tell you that I’m going to be fine.”
I forced a smile and stroked my hand up and down his right arm, a move I knew he loved. After four strokes he finally gave in and smiled back. With one last stroke, I leaned against Ray and kissed his cheek. He lightly touched my hair and that made me feel that it was alright to walk away.
When the hot water hit my body, it felt like it burned the flesh right off my bones. I needed the pain. Today I wanted something that would wash it all away. Wash away the thirst and the disappointment. As long as the water ran all I had to think about was the burning feeling on my skin. I must have lost track of time, because I heard Ray outside the bathroom door, trying to talk to me. Even though the water shut out most of the outside noise, it couldn’t drench out Ray’s strong voice.
”Gab it’s eight-twenty. I hope you remember that we have a class in thirty minutes.”
How could I possibly forget? It had been Ray’s idea that we should go to college, I would never have thought of anything so ridiculous. Living a life stuck behind a bench when you could enjoy the world was far beyond my understanding. But since Ray had always dreamt about higher education, who was I to say no to him? After everything he had done for me, I had to do this for him. I exhaled and took a deep breath. This anger couldn’t follow me today. I needed to be normal in front of the humans and especially Ray. When I started to focus on his face, the way it had looked this morning by the window, I felt the anger slowly melt away. So as the good girl I was portraying this day, I put on my thin protective skin and some clothes that Ray had laid out on my bed.
Because I hated to be seen too much in public eye, we had our special way to campus, a path that no human would come across by accident. It was too difficult for them to walk through the rough vegetation that occupied the entire road. This morning there was actually one class that I looked forward to and before I knew it, my excitement had spread down to my legs and I was in the lead for a change. Usually we would keep to a steady jog, which in human terms meant running, but since there was no time to do that, we ran the mile and a half that separated us from the buildings that together created the college.
After two weeks of classes and pep rallies I had grown not to hate the school with quite as much intensity as before. The feeling to describe it now was more like a discontentment of not having the freedom I had during our former life when we travelled from state to state and from country to country. We had the opportunity to feed wherever we wanted and whenever we felt like it. Now there were all of the sudden rules that according to Ray were very crucial to follow. Two rules were all there was but those two were more than enough for me. They meant for one: feeding on humans only once a week and two: never, ever feed on people from campus. I didn’t like the rules one bit but I also knew that without them we could never stay at the same place for four years. Four years compared to my lifetime was nothing, but thinking that I would be stuck here in California, on college with no new influences, no likeminded beings (which was an other one of Ray’s rules. He claimed that I was incapable of socialising with others of our kind without ”falling back into my old routines”) and limited food stock made me extremely frustrated. There would be only me and Ray. Plus thousands of humans but they didn’t count since they were off the menu.
When I continued to fantasize about running past the courtyard, into the naked desert, I felt Ray’s hand on my arm. It was in other words time to slow down and walk in ”normal” speed to our first class and my favourite: modern literature. Since I had been around for the last 160 years or so, I thought that there wasn’t more for me to learn about the world or anything in it. And when I had gone to my classes (which naturally were Ray’s classes too), I had realised that I was right earlier than I would have wanted. There was nothing more for me to learn inside this horrifying cage of so called knowledge. So as I went to my fourth period on my third day, I suspected another dull hour where I tried to tune out all of the boring familiar things that came out of the professor’s mouth. But after about seven minutes into his lecture, Mr Harrison had me enchanted. I had throughout the years always thought of myself as educated and smart but his words made me seriously doubt my core beliefs. This became the only class where I didn’t feel like sucking the blood out of everyone in the room. His knowledge and my thoughts running wild in my head somehow drenched out some of my cravings. Some is the key word here, because whenever I spoke to Mr Harrison after class, most of my attention was still focused on his pumping veins.
On our way to Mr Harrison’s classroom we walked by a pack of male humans who were just talking and laughing, nothing out of the ordinary. But they all looked so young and muscular and helpless and… As if he had read my mind, Ray turned my head around and I could feel that he used his powers on me to keep my focus away from the humans.
”Come on Ray I wasn’t going to do anything.”
Still he wouldn’t let me go. The blood thirst had vanished as quickly as it had washed over me and all I could think about now was that we would be late for the only class that I cared about.
“You feel better now?”
There was no judgment in his voice, only understanding. He was the only one who could realise how difficult this was for me. Giving up my freedom so that he could fulfil his dream of going to college wasn’t something you got used to in two weeks when you were a stubborn hag.
”Yes darling, I’m all better”, I replied in a smooth voice.
When the excusing smile came over my lips, I was surprised to find that I didn’t have to fake it.
”Let’s get on to class. I know it’s your favourite.”