"Christ, are you always this unstable? We'll need rhinoceros tranquilizers next time you're in a state."
Well, damn, thought Madeline. Coming to, she saw the formica table tossed upside down in a corner, Dimitri's IV bag shredded on the floor in a pool of blood. Her own fingers were bloody and shaking. "Damn," she expressed her sentiments aloud.
"Ah, well. There goes dinner. I'll live. Are
you hungry?" She looked hopefully up at him and involuntarily ran her tongue over her lips. "Sigh... Here." He pulled another blood sack from the fridge and proferred it. Never had she smelled anything so sweet. Blood had before smelled so metallic and strange to her. Now it was like a sweet liquor, with a honey-like, sickly quality, succulent, a delight to the senses. She grabbed for it with her hands, which, while shaking, moved with a viper-like agility that she had never before managed. The brown-haired boy of spiteful humor pulled it back from her, equally fast. "Easy, now. Miss manners would be ashamed." He slowly offered it again, and she slowly too it from him, only to wrench it open with her teeth and guzzle it like a drunkard. Oh, God, she thought. The cool blood trickled over the corners of her mouth and when she pulled the empty vessel away from her lips, it was a grotesque sight. Her mouth was red, her teeth stained and dripping. Running her tongue around the edges and over her newly sharpened teeth, she felt ashamed and sickened by her own lust for the ruby elixir.
"Better, now?" She turned her sharp eyes on the pale boy who spoke. This was the boy who brought her there, and for the first time, she took note of his features beyond his wry mouth. Deep brown-black sheets of hair framed his face and fell below his shoulders, producing a frightful shadow effect over his defined cheek bones when he bent to examine her eyes. He used his thumb and forefinger to hold her right, then her left eye open, shining an intense flashlight into her dilated pupils. It hurt, and Madeline flinched away, instinctively attempting to raise her hands to shield her face. She found them firmly held in the blond youth's hands. "Your irises. They're brown instead of yellow. That's to be expected, I suppose." His eyes, she noticed, were ringed in yellow, as were Dimitri's. The one that held her hands was gazing at the floor, his eyes averted from her face. "You can let go, Leif. She's fine now. She's eaten." Leif, the blond, released her hands and backed away slowly.
"You'll learn to live with it. Don't worry. You won't forget the change any more, like most werewolves. That's our doing. You'll remember the kill, the blood. You'll remember each individual taste like a fine wine. You'll be able to think clearly eventually. Most of your kind, you know... They won't remember a thing. They'll kill whenever they black out, feed, wake up face-down in a sewer covered in blood. They'll visit a hospital, get fixed up, see a shrink..."
"Dimitri..." Leif looked uncomfortable.
"I knew one once. Went sort of mad when he figured out what was up. Someone caught it on tape, see? Big, nasty thing when he turned. Like a giant bear-wolf, thing. He cut off ties with everyone he knew and dissapeared off the face o' the Earth." Leif looked like he was between crying and punching something. He slumped in a corner and put his head down heavily on his arms, as if compromising between these two urges.
"You won't be like that. Now you're hybrid, you'll gain control in that state." (Dark-haired boy speaking.)
"But not over the powerful bloodlust. Nope, you'll keep that, won't you?" Dimitri smiled amicably and took the empty bag from her, chucking it in another corner. "'Snot so bad."
~*~
Madeline Phelps stood on the sorry knoll at the edge of the great lake. Chicago's biting Autumn chills were made into furious knives by the winds. They would have driven a lesser mortal to the shelter of a coffee shop or suburban den. Madeline hardly felt it. It had been maybe a month since her initial introduction to this new life. She had been sending in her course assignments by mail sometimes, turning in extra credit in person occasionally. Princeton was a long way from here, and she was finding it difficult to return. She wrote letters to the school explaining creatively her absence from her classes, proving though constantly forwarded essays and tests that she was keeping up. Ill sometimes, traveling others, she had become something of a mystery to her former dorm mates. Still acing everything, she smugly thought, and not even in the same state, the same time zone. Provided she returned for the finals, she would graduate in the top 2% of her class. Life wasn't entirely over, at least...
As she pondered her school career, she felt her hands begin shaking, the world begin to go dark at the edges. From the pocket of her hoodie, she retrieved a dark orange prescription pill bottle. After thwarting the child-safe cap, she was able to--in one deft motion--shake four startlingly green capsules from the container. She popped them in her mouth, an expert at swallowing horse pills dry. She felt her muscles relax, slowly, one by one. Her hands stilled, and she put them and the pills in her pocket. About a million brain cells are screaming in agony right now, she thought. If my heart could actually stop, it would've by now. "What are you doing, Madeline?"
Cyprian. This was the dark-haired boy who saved her from oblivion, and also doomed her to a tortured exile from the world she new. He was her savior, her creator. She would bear the ugly scar of his razor-like canines on her neck for eternity, and resent him for it, too. He had an odd demeanor to match his odd name. Dark and introverted, but intensely concerned for the welfare of others. A hater of charitable gestures and helping hands extended to himself, but a great giver, Cyprian was something of a friend to her. His name, he persisted, was an old, old name, to be found on the walls War of 1812 memorials, easily. Whatever.
"Madeline. What are you doing to yourself?"
"Consuming matter, processing my rich environment. Once upon a time, I could have been sure my kidneys were working and I was pumping blood at an impossible rate, but really I don't know. You tell me."
"Your body is fulfilling its many functions grandly. Better than ever, I imagine. Really. I and our kind don't have that assurance, but you are still an animal. As a blood-sucking demon, I don't need to breathe and pump blood and purge my body of waste materials. The only difference in you from your original state is that your body functions only on blood, without a need for other nutrients."
"Is that all? No creatures of the night business, no supernatural powers and abilities?"
"I'd say an immunity to nutrient deficiencies is an advantage no one of your species has before achieved. Is that not an exhilarating prospect?"
"It alienates me from society and forces me to fight a secret war against my nature and my natural--no, supernatural--enemies. I am not so much exhilarated as depressed, disgusted. I'm a monster that belongs in neither world, and despite Dimitri's insistence, I am no closer to controlling my activities without the aid of--"
"Give me the bottle." Cyprian's hand was extended, and he frowned at her with a mixture of skepticism, annoyance, and pity. Madeline sighed and handed him the orange tube. He opened the cap and peered in. "Who gave you these?"
"A trusted physician." He somehow managed to frown and raise an eyebrow at the same time. He poured a few into his hand and closed his fingers over the green, lustrous beads of medicine. When he opened his hand, he had crushed the capsules and revealed a gray powder that he allowed to fall through his fingers. He chucked the open bottle into the lake with a sudden motion. "Hey! I need--"
"Those are exactly the words I never want to her. In context with any sort of corrective 'medicine', any sort of 'remedy' for what you are, I must never her you claim need for artificial securities."
"Cyprian Morgan, I don't know who you think you are to deny me of my prescribed medication. My attacks are fewer and far between, and I am less likely to blow up in your face if I have some material comfort to cling to. That is merely a relaxant."
"A depressant is more like it. I've seen that stuff. They sell it to us 'monsters' in this part of town to lessen our numbers, to kill our kind. Slayers, they're called. They are the suppressors, the oppressors. They are the true monsters."
"'This part of town?'"
"That's why we're here. To meet others, save others. Devourers of blood and flesh, both our species, gather here annually to discuss relocations, admit more to our ranks... We are not a cult, understand. It's more like a therapy group for those afflicted with a disease. Some are so vain as to think we're better than other species. They want to elevate some to their state, kill others. Some are--"
"Like you. Some are accidental cases. You've stumbled upon something so murky you cannot fathom its depths as you fall." She thought for a moment on how they were others, how there could be many. "How many come?"
"Few. There are so few left, maybe one hundred fifty, maybe even less. These 'slayers', these 'blood-letters'... They destroy more of us every year in the name of what? Religion, ethnic purity, 'better-than-thou' ideals..."
"Why am I here?"
"Because you were suffering your transformation. You're born a werewolf. You must have some of the blood in your line somewhere. You become a vampire through the oh-so-cliché biting ritual. I did not realize your injuries were from your escapades in wolf form when I bit you. I assumed you were suffering something else."
She gave a mirthless laugh. "What was I suffering from if not a supernatural affliction?"
"Loneliness?" he ventured.
"I suspect you had other reasons." He made no reply, denial or affirmation. "It's alright. Inconsequential, really. I'm here, anyway."
"Will you help us?" Madeline looked at her feet and wound her fingers together in her pockets, longing for her medicine bottle, if only as reassurance that she could stop the changes if she wanted to, stop the changes in herself, her life, her world.
"I will help you. That is to say, us. Our kind.
And I won't go back on what I've said."
Copyright 2008 C.B. Sanders
Comments (1)
Brilliant once again, my dear.
You've had me hooked on this story since the cafeteria.
Love it.
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