Chapter Three: 994 hours until day
I’d only slept a few short hours. Exhaustion covered me like a heavy veil, clinging stubbornly, but I wouldn’t be able to sleep again for a while. This was my normal waking depletion, not a prelude to slumber.
I slipped the robe on and crossed to the glass door on the far end of the room. I’d never seen a glass door on a home before—and certainly not a private door attached to a bedroom. It seemed so insecure.
Most homes had one door and few windows which were shockingly small—reinforced with glass so thick you almost couldn’t see out—and thick, heavy metal bars.
This door was decadence, sitting adjacent to the world I knew, mocking it. The doorknob clicked in my hand, and I stepped onto a small balcony that overlooked the back side of the estate. The view at the back was unlike the front with its expansive driveway and well-lit entry.
Rolling hills stretched before me that seemed to march on for miles. I was sure this must all be Gabriel’s property. If there was a high fence or a gate anywhere, it stood well outside my view.
I considered climbing down the trellis and escaping, but there was no point. Something worse would get me, and Simone was counting on my word that her medicine would arrive in time. There was no will or motivation to leave. Everything about my existence was about someone else now.
I looked up and was taken in all at once by the multitude and brightness of the stars above me, the clearness of the night, the gentle breeze that swept through oblivious to everything.
The wind didn’t know this was hell.
A sudden irrational shame came over me that this was a new experience when it must be so mundane. Then that feeling morphed into anger.
Here Gabriel existed with his expansive windows and glass doors and rolling hills that seemed to spit at the idea of security, free to step out into the night at any time or just walk out his front door—while I remained a prisoner, never able to even observe the darkened sky in real time. I might have been surprised by the existence of stars had I not learned about them in school or seen them in recordings. But flashes on a screen were not the same as the live experience.
I could have stepped outside any night and stood like I did in this moment, but there was Simone to consider. If not for her, would I have stood in the darkness, taunting and cheating fate? Maybe.
Time churned on as I stood on the balcony. The weather would change. Clouds would come. Rains. Thunder and lightning. I felt excitement at the possibility of seeing a real night storm. But almost immediately, the feeling faded into the dull, deadened filter I’d been swimming in for so long I could no longer remember a time when things were different.
I went back inside and rummaged through the closet. The clothing was in all different sizes, like a boutique. Most of it was lingerie, but I’d determined I would go downstairs, and I had to wear something more than a robe. The contents of the closet seemed better than a bathrobe which could so easily be torn off.
I selected a black leather corset that seemed as if it had been constructed especially for me. When I got it on and fastened it all together, it lay over my skin like a gentle caress. No pinches or gaps, just a sleek, second skin. There were panties in a drawer, and I found a pair of black pants that didn’t look unwelcome with the corset. I didn’t bother with shoes. It wasn’t as if I was going anywhere, and Gabriel had that whole weird shoe thing with his floors. I slipped the small countdown clock into my pocket.
In the bathroom, I stood in front of the mirror and ran a brush through my hair. The gold glinted in the light at my throat. I saw now that it wasn’t a solid polished band, but had etchings all around that made it seem as if it were filled with glittering jewels instead of an unbroken piece of gold.
I didn’t search for cosmetics in the bathroom drawers. I’d never bothered, and unless Gabriel ordered it on penalty of Simone’s life, I didn’t intend to start now. It had always seemed like a way to advertise availability to the predators in the city. And all I’d ever wanted was to blend into the great noise and background, to be left in peace. I didn’t see the benefit of attracting a mate when the law wouldn’t protect me from him after dark.
I didn’t know what Gabriel wanted from me exactly besides blood and his fixation with “bringing me back to life” as if I were some badly cared for plant sitting in the corner of a grow house somewhere.
When I stepped into the hallway, I was surprised by how alive the house felt. It was filled to the brim with people—or whatever type of creature my captor was. I still couldn’t comprehend them. I recalled the stories I’d been raised with of gods who saved the people when night turned long. The myths told of a great war, and even the stars fought in it—which was nonsense. We weren’t a tribe of pre-scientific illiterates. And I couldn’t imagine that we had been when the stories were written, either.
But the story went that in the aftermath everything had changed, and night, instead of being a few hours at a time, stretched on and on. Nothing could grow in the ground. Everything was dying. The gods stepped in and used superior technologies and powers to create a world where things could grow inside large, lush glass domes, safe from the never-ending night. Only a few hardy varieties of tree and grass could adapt to so much darkness outside the domes, and each night the grass went dead and brown and the trees appeared gnarled and twisted and without life.
Nobody believed any of this past the age of six or seven. But what if it wasn’t just a story, and Gabriel had saved my species from dying out? If true, it was cruelty. It wasn’t as if I’d been given a world in which to thrive—only one to hide and struggle in and be afraid of.
If Gabriel and his kind had saved humanity, it was only to protect their food source.
A woman about my age—but much less clothed than me—giggled and dragged a man down the hallway toward another bedroom. He smiled as he passed, fangs visible, his eyes glowing that eerie orange-red like Gabriel’s had.
At the end of the hallway was an ornate staircase that led downstairs to the main portion of the house. I gripped the railing to steady myself and descended. The man at the bottom seemed to catch my scent on the air and looked up. It was the one who’d beaten me nearly to death in the dungeon.
Before I could decide how to react, he inclined his head as if I were visiting royalty and turned back to his conversation. When I reached the ground level, he stepped aside to let me pass. In that moment it seemed impossible he’d ever raised a hand to harm me.
On the main level were dozens of men in suits and women in formal gowns who exuded a sense of entitlement as if the world belonged entirely to them. And perhaps it did. Juxtaposed against that were scantily dressed women in collars and black lingerie and a spattering of men who seemed even less dressed. I stood out in all of that, someone who wasn’t an invited guest, but who was decidedly less naked than the group I was intended to be a part of.
I slipped past clusters of people and ducked underneath the staircase behind a large potted plant. An overstuffed raspberry-colored chair hid behind the plant as if the house knew sometimes a person needed to get away. I sat, shielded from view of the others, trying to decide if I should go hide back upstairs.
But it seemed doubtful the party would ever die down. This was the environment I was stuck figuring out how to navigate until morning.
A couple of the nicely dressed women came to stand next to the plant, blocking my exit for a time.
“Did you hear? Gabriel took a girl for the night.”
“Yes. It’s so odd. I can’t remember the last time he collared someone. Usually he just samples all of them. Why do you think he chose her?”
The other woman shrugged. “I couldn’t begin to imagine the motivation behind what the royals do.”
“I heard Renard almost killed her in the dungeon. He said she had a death wish. She didn’t budge.”
“That’s foolishness. She budged or she’d be dead. Gabriel wouldn’t have bothered saving her otherwise.”
“That’s what everyone’s saying. Clarissa said Renard told her directly. He said the girl made some sort of agreement with Gabriel to protect her sick sister. She wouldn’t have caved if she had no one to protect. That was Renard’s judgment, anyway.”
“How peculiar.”
They startled and silenced as they did curtsies that looked ridiculous in their gowns.
“Are you enjoying yourselves, ladies?” Gabriel’s voice was clearly recognizable.
“Y-yes, sir.”
“Have you fed? There are plenty of young, healthy men who’d be happy to nourish and entertain you both. Or a couple of the girls could see to you if you prefer something more delicate and nuanced. A room in one of the cottages opened up if you’d like to take advantage of it.”
They made another fumbled attempt at a curtsy and scurried away together.
I’d held my breath from the moment Gabriel approached. I wondered how much of their conversation he’d picked up and was sure they wondered the same.
Through the thick foliage, I saw his nostrils flare. It was that not-quite-human behavior I was beginning to associate with his kind. He must have been aware of me, but he didn’t acknowledge my presence. Instead he turned and merged back into the pulse of the party.
I would have preferred him to pull me out from my hiding place, even if he humiliated me in front of everyone. At least I’d know what I was supposed to do now. I didn’t like the idea of a bunch of strangers speculating about me, talking about me as if I were a stray puppy someone had taken in on grounds of random fascination. I further didn’t like that the gold band at my throat identified me as the girl they were talking about so that I couldn’t even blend in a crowd and disappear.
I sat a while longer until my hunger overwhelmed my need to avoid whatever I’d signed on for. I slipped out from under the stairs and retraced steps from earlier in the night when I’d been led to the kitchen to call Simone.
There were no blood drinkers there, just a few other humans. A couple of girls, one totally nude and unbothered by that state, the other in lingerie. A shirtless man in a collar and a pair of light-colored pants sat at the table with a steaming bowl of stew. There was a pot still on the stove.
The guy looked up at me and pointed to his own collar. “You must belong to the king.”
The nude woman grabbed a robe, wrapped it around herself, and sat at the table with the other woman. All three of them looked at me expectantly.
The robed woman extended a hand. “I’m Simone.”
I’m sure I visibly flinched. Was she making a joke? Did they know that was my sister’s name? Knowing there was someone in this house with the same name as my sister horrified me and reminded me of what I was doing here—desperately hoping to appease Gabriel so he might not hurt her.
The woman seemed unaware of my inner struggle. “Everybody calls me Mona, though.”
“That’s not why they call you that,” the guy said.
“Shut up, Drake. God, you’re a pig.”
He snorted and went back to his stew.
The other girl placed a bowl in front of me. “You look like you’re half starving. I’m Jane.”
“Helene,” I said. They seemed fascinated by my presence and not at all worried about their own situation. I was sure that must mean they’d been here before tonight, and once again I was puzzled by how nobody in the city seemed to know about any of this.
Drake turned his attention back to me, a slow smile spreading across his face. “I’d love to show you around the estate.”
Even I knew that was a line.
“Ignore him,” Mona said. “Gabriel doesn’t collar anyone for himself often, but when he does, he’s very possessive. Drake has plenty of women here to fraternize with.”
“Is that what we’re calling it now?” He winked at me, but I turned away and focused on my food.
“This is good,” I said. I’d half-expected it to be the human equivalent of pet food. If my captors didn’t eat regular food, why would they make the effort to feed us anything that tasted like anything?
“Mona made it.”
Oh. Well, that made sense—more sense than Gabriel or one of the others standing around in the kitchen with a wooden spoon over a big pot.
“What is he? Gabriel and the others?”
“You really don’t know?” Mona said. “They’re the gods.”
I wouldn’t let myself believe she meant what I thought she meant even though I’d already thought it myself.
“You know…the stories. They’re the gods.”
“None of that’s true. Who told you that?” Even in the myths, the gods weren’t described as having glowing eyes and fangs and drinking blood. Yes, they were said to be immortal and very strong, but that was all.
“They did,” she said.
So if someone proclaimed himself a god, we were just going with it now?
“I overheard a few of them talking about royals and saying Gabriel was the king,” I said.
“That’s who they are and how they’re organized to each other. To us, they’re the gods. You don’t have to like it, but we owe our continued existence to them.”
So there was someone for me to blame directly. No longer was it the nameless faceless “rules” that shifted between day and night—the totality of power behind curtains. It was real living beings.
I had nothing further to add to the conversation. But listening to them as I ate, I got the impression they considered it a great honor to serve the gods by prostituting themselves to them—as if this were a holy pilgrimage they made each time the dark came.
“Helene.”
I looked up, startled. “Yes?”
“I know it’s a lot to take in,” Mona said, “but isn’t it better than being locked away in your house terrified for most of your life?”
I shrugged. If I thought that, I’d beg Gabriel to bring Simone here to protect her. Instead, I still hoped she could remain far from this place. This bargain didn’t seem as sweet to me as it did to them. And what would happen when “the gods” grew bored? What about when their dinner and playthings aged? When our blood wasn’t as sweet? It hadn’t escaped my notice that there were no old people here.
The gods seemed to have no interest in sparing the old or the unattractive, so it was hard to see things in the same altruistic light my co-prisoners saw them.
I suspected they were somewhat in love with the powerful beings that leeched off their life force. I remembered the brief euphoria when Gabriel bit me. If I didn’t feel so muted inside, I could imagine it seeming more exciting. I could imagine the addictive dopamine rush growing in strength each time it happened. I could envision a world in which I would have waited outside, begging for another chance to serve their appetites.
As it was, I just wanted to survive and please Gabriel until Simone got her pills.
When the three of them saw they were getting nowhere with me, they withdrew back into a conversation with each other. I took my bowl to the sink and poured water in it.
“Do I need to wash this?” I was sure the gods weren’t washing our dishes for us.
Jane waved me away. “We have a rotation, but Gabriel wouldn’t want his personal slave doing menial work.” She didn’t seem bitter. It was just the facts of life around here in this bizarre hierarchy we’d found ourselves in. I certainly didn’t mind washing a dish. I wasn’t that precious. But I also didn’t want to disrupt the social order or do anything that might make Gabriel go back on his word.
“Thanks, Mona. It was great.”
“I plan to expose you to my entire cooking repertoire while you’re here,” she said.
Even if I thought their acceptance of all this was deluded, I felt a twinge of jealousy toward their outlook and apparent happiness. I wished those feelings came so easily to me.
A feminine scream erupted through the house. “No! Let me go!”
So much for their fantasies about how wonderful everything was. But no one sitting at the table seemed bothered.
“Fresh meat!” Drake said with glee as a door slammed from another part of the house.
I slipped out of the kitchen and down the hallway, following the trail of the screaming and struggling woman who’d just been brought in.
I wasn’t sure if more eyes were on her or me. Both of us seemed to be of interest to those who’d gathered in Gabriel’s home. My master sat in the regal chair beside the fireplace where I’d met him. I tried to blend with the others in the room.
I looked down and realized no one was wearing shoes. It struck me as almost painfully funny that these snobby blood-drinking assholes were all dressed up while their footwear sat in some tangled pile. If I’d doubted Gabriel’s power before, for some reason, this alone put that doubt to rest. Anyone who could enforce his no-shoe rule among this group could probably do anything.
When Santo threw the girl down on the rug in front of Gabriel, she’d already been relieved of her shoes.
“You are my slave until morning. My name is Gabriel, but you will call me Master. You will address anyone I share you with by that title as well—or Mistress as the case may be.”
It was the same thing he’d said to me earlier in the evening—as if he’d said it hundreds or thousands of times before, so many times the words came out unchanged.
She trembled, terrified, her eyes darting around the room—as if seeking a savior in the gathering crowd. She had the look about her as if she were certain someone would begin throwing rocks in a moment. I couldn’t blame her.
“Well?” Gabriel said. “Address me.”
Her gaze dropped to the ground. “Y-yes, Master.”
The ease of her capitulation was unsettling. She’d screamed and fought, and yet all it had taken was a few calm words from Gabriel for her to accept herself as his slave.
He nodded and waved a hand to dismiss her. “The rooms in the main house are assigned. Take her to the last cottage on the end and get one of the girls to explain things to her and help her acclimate.”
“Yes, sir,” Santo said.
He hauled her up off the ground to carry out the order. She seemed calmer, as if all she’d ever needed was for someone to give her a purpose, no matter what that purpose was. Any would do.
“Santo?” Gabriel said.
He turned. “Yes, sir?”
“That will be enough. We have plenty for the night now. You can resume your normal duties.”
“Yes, sir.”
A few minutes later someone official-looking entered, and again, the room fell silent. The new stranger exuded some amount of authority on his own, but even he hadn’t been able to ignore Gabriel’s rules protecting the integrity of the floors. He handed Gabriel a thick, cream-colored envelope with a gold seal. The paper looked expensive.
“Her Majesty says I am to wait for a reply.”
Gabriel rolled his eyes. No one had called him by such a formal title, even though there had been murmurings that he was the king. Did he have a queen in exile? He opened the letter and stood to read it. It was several pages.
Every few lines he made an angry growling noise, which seemed out of character given how controlled I’d seen him since my arrival. With each growl, the room grew more tense. When he finished, he walked the few steps to the fireplace and tossed the letter into the flames. The pages curled in on themselves and whimpered into ashes.
“And what should I say to her?” the messenger asked.
“Report what you witnessed. She’s not an idiot. She needs no further commentary from me.”
The messenger bowed and excused himself from the party.
This was the point at which Gabriel either noticed my presence or decided to acknowledge it.
“Helene.”
The crowd parted, leaving nothing but a few yards of empty space between the two of us. I held my breath as his gaze roved over me. I didn’t know if I should kneel or bow or curtsy or address him or stay silent or…I was willing to do whatever he wanted no matter how stupid, humiliating, or painful as long as Simone would be safe. But I had no idea what was appropriate given the full set of circumstances.
Gabriel spared me further awkward embarrassment with an outstretched hand. I took it, and he turned back to his guests. “I’m sure I’ll see you all at various points throughout the night.” The guests inclined their heads or made a bow or curtsy. Then he led me from the room and out of the house into a night that was quickly becoming more relief than burden.
***
Adrenaline buzzed through me once we were outside. I was overwhelmed by the smells of the rare night-blooming flowers, the breeze, the smooth flat warmth of the stones in the driveway under my feet, and the soft cool grass. I didn’t know a single person with a lawn. The few grasses that were hardy and managed to stay alive through the nights had adapted and hibernated through the long dark periods.
But this grass was a soft, sensitive type that would require constant periods of light and feeding to be nurtured through the night. It was one more thing to add to the growing list of simple extravagance that I wouldn’t have even thought about trying to have in my life before.
At the bottom of a hill, another house rose into view. This house was larger and nicer than the many cottages we’d passed on the estate but not quite the size of the main house.
“These are my private chambers,” he said as we approached. Santo stood guard outside the front door as if he’d been there all night rather than leaving the house only a few minutes before we had. How had he taken that girl to her cottage and made it back already? How fast could they move?
Once inside and away from the furtive gazes of the guests, Gabriel took both of my hands and looked me over again. “How are you feeling? Have you eaten?”
These were the last things I expected him to say. “Fine, Master. Yes, I’ve eaten.”
I didn’t actually know what I was feeling besides off-balance. It was at this moment that I set up the game in my head, the question I’d ask myself each time things got sufficiently strange that I wasn’t sure if the malaise I’d lived with for an intractable length of time now had lifted or not. If he offered me death now, would I take it?
Yes.
No temporary distraction changed the base reality of the world in which I lived. There was no sense pretending that any of it was worth clawing and struggling to hold onto. If Gabriel truly thought he could bring me back to life, he had no idea the size of the mountain he would have to scale.
And yet.
When his warm hand rested against my cheek, I shifted toward him the tiniest amount. From a well somewhere deep inside me I felt that if his hand stayed there long enough, surely he could melt the block of ice around me, and I would awaken some new creature that saw the world in full color.
But without those sharp, protective edges, what would protect me?
I didn’t want to live, but I wanted to want to. Then I thought about Mona and Drake and Jane and the other deluded fools whose names I didn’t know here. I thought about how someday the rug would be ripped out from under them. Their charms would fade, and with it, the immortals would lose interest to the degree their repulsion for the weakness of human aging grew. Night would go back to being the same nightmare it had always been. Only this time, they would be without survival skills because of the long, easy detour they’d taken along the way.
It was all just a distraction from the inevitable. Suffering and fear and pain and death. The only escape was an unending silence. Erasure.
And Gabriel and his kind never had to worry about it. Young and beautiful and healthy and strong and rich and powerful and safe. Forever. Or at least that was how it seemed to me, given the small amount of information I’d been exposed to on the topic so far.
I think I just snapped—just broke completely with reality. It was as if I were a thin ribbon spiraling off the spool. Just one tiny slip in the winding, and I’d shifted somewhere else without boundaries or borders. I forgot about Simone and why I’d agreed to live for a while.
On a wall just behind Gabriel was a spear. It seemed primitive compared even to everything in his old-fashioned home. I darted around him and tore it off the wall, drunk on anger at the world.
But anger was something. It was an emotion. It wasn’t this dull foam wrapped around me.
I just wanted to make the anger last, because just like in the dungeon, it felt like something.
I don’t remember hauling my arm back or aiming at any one particular thing. I just remember the moment the sharp metal point pierced through Gabriel’s shoulder and the growl that ripped the silence of the room apart.
Santo rushed in, no doubt to kill me. And in the moment before I remembered Simone and what this might mean for her, the relief settled over me again.
Finally. Everything is over.
“Leave us,” Gabriel said as the spear clattered to the ground, staining a light gray carpet with his blood.
“But, sir…”
“Leave!”
Santo scurried out.
By this point, I’d scrambled to a corner, leaning against the wall. I couldn’t make the tears stop. I just kept thinking that once he’d killed me, he’d take it out on Simone. And even if he decided to spare her the overflow of his rage, she’d die from his neglect. There was no way he’d bother to take the pills to her now.
The buttons on the front of his shirt popped as he ripped the clothing apart and tossed it in the fire.
“I liked that shirt,” he said, his eyes glowing to match the flames as if he could burn me to ashes with his gaze alone.
I gasped when I saw his shoulder. There was a bit of blood, but it was as if it had spilled on him—not like he’d been bleeding himself. Rationally, if he could heal the gruesome horror of my back by licking it—a thought which still inspired revulsion—then, of course, he would heal fast on his own.
But it had seemed certain at the moment I’d taken the spear off the wall, that something that sharp and powerful could take down even a lion like Gabriel.
He stood over me, his arms crossed over his chest. Disappointment.
“Helene, I thought we’d made a deal. Do you or do you not have a sister whose life depends on the drugs in my possession?”
The question was rhetorical, but it was obvious he wanted me to say it anyway.
“I do, Master.” It seemed like a good time to offer titles and deference since I’d just ruined his shirt. That was the only real thing I’d managed, but I assumed the insult was that we both knew what my intent had been even if it had been a futile fantasy from the start.
“Then you should be happy I’m so hard to kill.”
Hard? Not impossible? But killing him wouldn’t solve anything even if I could figure out how. Though I resented him for the ease and perfection of his life, I didn’t want him dead. Maybe stabbing him had been an expression of frustration that I couldn’t find it inside me to turn that spear on myself.
Simone had teased me about the long baths I used to take. She didn’t know they were so long because I spent a good portion of that time with a razor blade poised above my wrist. It was supposed to be one of the more painless ways to do it. But all I could ever do was stare at the gleaming blade until the water turned frigid.
I don’t know if I never did it because Simone needed me, or if I couldn’t bear the horror and pain she’d face when she saw glassy, lifeless eyes looking up from an overflowing pool of diluted red. Or maybe I was just a coward—too scared to face what was beyond the curtain of my life, or the blank black nothingness that might be the punchline of the joke.
In the dungeon, all I’d had to do was not try to stop the train that barreled down the track toward me. And how could I stop something so powerful as a train? I just had to let it happen. Simone wouldn’t find me or have to see it. I wouldn’t have to be the one that made the final choice.
But now, sitting here, awaiting whatever retribution Gabriel might mete out, I couldn’t work up an emotion about anything, except a vague fear for Simone. The anger had already dissipated. I couldn’t even maintain the energy for that anymore. I was slipping away. I felt I might explode into a burst of tiny fluttery winged creatures that would dissipate into the night, leaving no trace I’d ever been.
I looked up to see Gabriel sitting in a chair beside the fireplace, studying me. His eyes went back and forth from the glowing orange-red to his normal light green. He gripped the edge of the chair, his hand shaking almost imperceptibly. It wasn’t fear or some infirmity; it was anger—that feeling I couldn’t hold onto and he was trying to release. For my sake? For his own?
The bloody spear lay inert on the light gray rug between us. I couldn’t find the anger I’d just had, or any other strong emotion. I could barely grasp onto the energy to stand. But I grabbed the spear again, and this time I was aware of the moment I hauled it back, aiming it at his heart. I didn’t think it would kill him, but I thought it might kill me. In a round about way. If it became clear that I’d relentlessly stab him every opportunity I got, maybe…
He caught my wrist mid-air and wrenched the spear from my hand. He hurled it across the room, embedding it so far into the wall that I wouldn’t be able to get it back out again with my own strength.
“I don’t think you care about Simone at all,” he said.
I broke down then in an incessant litany of sobs as I crumbled on top of him. Simone was the cord that kept me here, but even that was unraveling. Of course I knew she needed me. It would be wrong and cruel to leave her here, but if I was so useless to myself right now, how could I help her? Wouldn’t she be better off without me in the end? If she survived this one night, surely she’d find a friend to move in with. Surely I was the only thing that kept her life from improving.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she did see how lost and broken I was. Maybe she saw her sister had become a shell of moving parts and nothing more. Maybe she was just too kind to point it out.
The bargain I’d made with Gabriel was starting to feel as impossible to hold onto as a drifting cloud. Assuming we both kept our end and Simone got her medicine, that was only immediate survival. There would be another night after this and another and another. And the wait for day seemed to get longer each time no matter that the countdown clocks always started at the same number of hours. I couldn’t be the only one who felt it.
I wasn’t sure how Simone could be so optimistic. She was only a bit younger than me. It couldn’t be for lack of life experience. So was she the crazy one or was I? It seemed I was the only one who saw the world objectively as it was—an endless, pointless parade of shit.
I was so lost inside myself that at first I didn’t notice Gabriel stroking my hair. At first I didn’t hear the “Shhh shhhh”. It sounded like a calm fervent prayer to a distant god. It brought back the talk in the kitchen about the gods. I wondered if I should pray to Gabriel—if that might somehow make it all better.
I remembered the stories we’d read off the glass screens as children. I’d thought they were silly, but Simone had said she believed. We had so much technology around us, but in the end they were mere toys for a primitive species pretending to be advanced. We might as well have had sticks and stones and prayed to fire for how little we knew about the bigger questions of life and death.
The technology distracted us from our lack of answers to anything that mattered. It gave us a lesser form of magic to wield to appease us. But here, in the house with the wood and warm fire and paper books and no sign of advanced technology in sight—not a single cold white or silver appliance with sharp corners—was the real magic. Gabriel could have anything he wanted, and instead of gadgets and devices that whirred and spun and flashed and spit words out at people, he’d gone a different way.
If I let myself, I could fall into the peace of it, the stillness and solitude of the crackling and popping fire, the real solid physical things that seemed to give weight to my existence. But I didn’t know how to be in a moment and enjoy the simplicity and beauty it offered. I couldn’t stop the insistent feeling of guilt at even the idea of real happiness or peace inside the world as it was.
I managed to quiet the chattering in my mind to come back to the moment where Gabriel was still petting my hair, still saying “shhhh”. I cried through every thought that relentlessly tormented me. There was no cage Gabriel could put me in that could be any worse than the one I’d locked myself into already.
“It’s my fault they’re gone.” The words spilled out with no real thought to how they’d arisen in my mind.
“What?” His voice was still soothing. I couldn’t begin to imagine how he’d switched from rage to comfort in such a small beat of time. Maybe my suffering was so pathetic that it was impossible to maintain anger at me in the face of it.
And now I’d said those words. And he’d heard me say them. I sat on his lap, wrapped in his arms, trying to pretend I hadn’t spoken, hoping the moment would pass, and his question would wither away with it.
“Helene?”
He wouldn’t let the moment go in peace, and I was too emotionally drained to protest. And it seemed likely a part of my fatigue was keeping these thoughts not only from others, but from myself for so long. They had been in mental storage, in boxes and crates marked “Do not open”, “Fragile”. They should have stayed there.
“My parents. I wasn’t careful about the time. It should have been me, not them.” It had been nights and nights ago. I’d been careless, knowing but not yet comprehending the danger after dark. How unfortunate that I should learn that lesson in such a harsh way. Simone had been at home, waiting in the locked house. I was the only one who came back that night.
I still couldn’t forgive myself for surviving. She hadn’t blamed me. She’d been just about to reach the full flush of adulthood. Perhaps she hadn’t known to blame me. Or maybe she was in denial, and one day she’d wake up and realize I was the reason we had no family but each other. I almost welcomed her startled rage.
We’d mourned, and things had gone back to some version of normal. Simone had regained her will to exist in the world—flowering in spite of everything—but mine died with our parents. I’d existed, wearing masks of various sorts as the hours of our lives marched on. I’d smiled while my eyes were dead and laughed at things that weren’t funny. But I hadn’t been able to cry, not even as an act. It required far more thespian skill than I was qualified to display.
The first time I’d cried since my parents died was in the dungeon with Renard trying to whip me into oblivion. And now with Gabriel. I’d been afraid that if I started crying I might never stop. And judging from the events so far in the night, the theory had teeth. It hadn’t been safe to cry in front of Simone, or while at my work during the day hours. I might lose my job, or keep crying when I got home to my sister after each shift. I couldn’t lay that burden on her. She’d carried enough.
Gabriel’s strange home, far from the ugly fluorescence of the city, had been the first safe space to grieve.
He stood with me in his arms and carried me up a flight of stairs and down a hallway. I wasn’t sure if he was putting me back to bed—as if I could sleep off my dysfunction—or if he had other plans in mind. It was hard to know how he might think now was a time to make use of my charms, no matter what I’d previously agreed to or why.
But I wanted to know if he could make me feel other things besides pain and grief and anger.
When we reached his room, he sat me down gently on his bed and began to unbutton his pants. I looked away, not sure how to deal with the increasing expanse of male skin I was being exposed to. I wasn’t a virgin, but near enough to it. I’d dated a few men in the bright safety of day but had yet to be able to trust a relationship beyond that point.
What if he turned into a monster once night fell? It didn’t seem worth it to me, and I couldn’t understand the women who ran headlong into what I perceived as danger. My mother had been lucky with my dad. But what if I wasn’t so lucky? What if Simone wasn’t? She hadn’t paired off, either. But each day she seemed to get closer and closer to wanting to find a mate of her own. The instinct to avoid loneliness always seemed to outrun the instinct for self-preservation.
And if she did find someone, she’d no longer be my responsibility, and the last thing keeping me here would fly away.
Gabriel’s voice interrupted my inner monologue. “If one of my kind had done what you did downstairs, they would have been tortured and put to death. My kind is hard to kill, and it’s not a pleasant way to die.”
As if there were any pleasant ways.
How did he define what his minion had done to me in the dungeon? Gabriel’s threats and implied mercy held no sway over me.
He continued. “I’m going to punish you, but not right now. Stop trying to kill me. It will only earn you consequences.”
His hands hooked into my pants as he pulled me to my feet, then he unbuttoned them and shoved them over my hips and to the ground. The panties followed. He painstakingly unclasped each hook of the corset and tossed it to the side. He produced a key and unlocked the collar at my throat.
Was he ending our agreement? Had he decided to keep me at the house like the others? The idea of having to deal with all of those that came to the house and their various appetites was more than I could cope with. If that was his plan, he should go ahead and just kill me now. Even for Simone, I only had the will and energy for so much. I mean, I’d basically killed my parents, so why not finish off the rest of my family? It seemed a fitting end.
I shook that nasty thought from my head as Gabriel set the band on the table beside the bed. I couldn’t bring myself to ask him if he was changing things, if I’d lost his protection in the house. It wasn’t as if I expected him to defend me no matter what I did.
He pulled me flush against him, his warm skin pressing against mine. Just standing there, we fit together like interlocking pieces in a puzzle that had seemed mystifyingly complex only moments before. And now it was so simple.
Although he’d just scolded me, his expression held no anger, no contempt, no clear desire for revenge. Perhaps he could make his face appear any way he wanted, while his true thoughts lay under the surface. Maybe the moment I’d just witnessed with his mask slipping was more revealing than I wanted to believe. If he was too unhinged, then all this was pointless, and Simone would die for it. If she’d die anyway, the least he could do was kill me like I’d wanted from the start.
His large hand rested on the column of my throat. Then he took it away, and it was his mouth there instead. At first it was a soft, gentle kiss that I had to strain to remain aware of—like a butterfly’s wings beating against my skin—then it was a sharp sting that stole my breath as his fangs pierced the vulnerable flesh.
He growled softly as he drank. Images and thoughts and feelings about my parents’ death floated to the surface again. It was all sharp edges and burning pain…until it wasn’t. The edges blurred. The memories remained, but they started to feel distant, as if they’d happened to someone else a long time ago. It was a story I’d heard instead of a story I’d lived.
I struggled in his arms when I realized he was stealing from me. What right did he have to take my pain away? Without it, my life was a perpetual fall into nothing. They were the only feelings I could maintain, even if they’d burrowed so deep I often didn’t notice them anymore. But now I noticed their absence, and there was nothing to fit inside those spaces.
Even though it was done now, I fought against him, but he held me still while he finished feeding. He ran his tongue over his bite, and I knew it had healed just as my back had previously. No evidence of any of his crimes would remain behind.
When he stepped away, I’d planned to scream at him, to demand an explanation for why he felt he had the right to do that. Yes, I’d made an agreement with him, but I hadn’t known the full meaning of being his. I had assumed he’d fuck me, and once I knew his nature, I assumed he’d drink my blood. I had thought he might visit some level of sadism on me just because he could. But there was nothing that could have prepared me for him invading my mind, rooting around my thoughts, trying to control and manage my own personal narrative.
At the very least, I should have the right to my own thoughts and feelings. He shouldn’t be able to own even that.
But I couldn’t express any of this, because he’d moved to the bed, wrapped himself in a sheet, and started rocking. Tears streamed down his face. It seemed absurd that he knew how to cry. And why should he be able to when it had taken me so long to find even the first tear of my own?
I was still angry he thought he had some right to poke around inside my head and twist my memories around and mold and shape them so that he could more easily mold and shape me. But what he’d just done had a price.
It was as if he’d become me. These memories that were now distant—another person’s story—were his. The anguish on his face was real, the pain seeming to cut straight through him. And it occurred to me that the last thing I needed right now was a being as powerful as Gabriel carrying around the pain I’d learned to manage.
His eyes glowed again, and his fangs descended. His growl became a roar as he struggled out of the bed sheets. He grabbed them and ripped as if tearing the sheets apart was the only way he could stop himself from tearing me apart.
His gaze met mine, then he changed into a monster—a demon. Even those concepts had been scrubbed and sanitized in the stories of my childhood. This was the reality behind the cleaned-up version. He no longer looked even remotely human. He was huge—at least a foot taller, his muscles bulging impossibly large, fur growing everywhere. His fingers changed into sharp, hooked claws.
The mere glow of his eyes and fangs of before had been the civilized version of what he could become. It was the restrained result of ages of control. There didn’t seem to be anything inside of him any longer that understood language. He didn’t recognize me. He sprinted past me and practically flew down the stairs, out the front door, and into the night.
I stayed frozen at the top of the staircase, my gaze fixed on the open front door. Santo stood in the doorway staring up at me, a look of disgust on his face as if it were my fault Gabriel had lost all his sense. Feeling self-conscious and remembering my lack of clothing, I darted back into the bedroom and dressed.
I wondered if Gabriel had expected the transformation. It made sense he wouldn’t want to ruin his own clothes, but why remove mine? All I could think was that he’d had other plans, and this choice to take my pain as his own had changed the agenda. Maybe he’d underestimated what he was getting himself into.
I stared at the gold collar on the dresser for a long time and the key sitting just beside it. I was certain the collar had only come off because he’d wanted to feed at my throat, and it got in his way. It wasn’t a rejection or ending of our deal. At least I thought it probably wasn’t. I put the collar on and went back downstairs.
When I stepped outside, Santo glared at me.
“What did you do to him?”
He had a special kind of nerve to ask such a question. As if what they’d done to me didn’t matter at all. And from their perspective, I was sure it didn’t. My entire species was a source of food and amusement, like an adorable chick that grows up to become a chicken sandwich.
I ignored him and stepped out into the grass. We both knew he couldn’t touch me, and despite what Gabriel had done upstairs, removing pain wasn’t the same as replacing it with something else. The will to live is like a habit. When it goes away for a long time, even if the initial thing that took it away is gone, it’s hard to make it start back up again.
Maybe there was a phase two to Gabriel’s plan, but at the moment, I was nothing more than an empty vessel. Most of the poisonous contents had been poured out, but nothing new had been put in. I still didn’t have anything to live for beyond Simone. The world had not measurably changed.
And while the sharpest edges of guilt and pain over my parents had been drained out of me by Gabriel’s fangs, it wasn’t as if his bite had brought them magically back to life.
I remembered the hours and hours each night I’d stayed in the house with Simone while we tried not to go mad from our self-imposed captivity. It was exhausting having to pretend for her sake, when all I’d wanted was to go out into the night and allow whatever awful fate waited to claim me so we could end it and be done with the drama and suspense.
I’d thought…someday even those monsters we feared would grow old and have to hide in their own homes. They may be young and strong and vicious now, but that would be taken from them and they’d be reduced to the place Simone and I had always lived in.
That was when I’d thought all the monsters were human and that there was possibly even the mildest hint of fairness in the world.
The cottages on the property were lined in a semi-circle at the back of the house with a huge expanse of rolling green hills in between. Trees were scattered in among the cottages themselves, but none were in the middle. I went to the center-most point, the most open area I could find, and lay down in the grass, looking up at the stars overhead.
It wasn’t much, but this moment was the most free I’d ever been. To be out in the open in the night was a decadence I’d only imagined before now—though I could have done it at any time. But there would have been a price.
Here, there was no price.