Bloodlust & Redemption

Chapter 1—Death's Call

March 7, 1819

Yet died he by a stranger's hand,

And stranger in his native land;

"The Giaour" by Lord Byron

His skin was almost as pale as mine, except he had blue veins running full of blood beneath his flesh. I could not have known if he actually thought of me as corporeal or as a malady of his senses. Regardless, we had spoken at length about escaping the physical misery of his illness and about hurting the loved ones left behind. In between his moments of affliction, he was introspective, able to look at the sober truths of the world around him differently than he had bothered to before.

"I do wish to take you up on your offer posthaste, but I can not leave her alone as of yet." A light form of a smile had pulled at Lord Hayes' dry lips interfering with his ability to speak. Still unsure as to why, as it was not quite an admissible prospect to my genteel habits, I had offered him an escape from his pain; and I was thankful the proper words had come.

"After our words, I had not thought you would prefer it." I touched his hand briefly only to watch his heated body shutter under the chill of my skin.

"Wait," he beckoned me a bit louder than he had been speaking.

"Yes?" I looked once more upon the young man whose face was tightened by a stitch of intolerable pain as his last dose of opium ran thin. Yet, he still unselfishly clung to life for one he loved so much. He was conflicted by his sister's burdens in caring for him or in mourning his death.

"I have to, for as long as I possibly can, give Margaret the opportunity to try and save me. But, if I have to have a release from this wretched miserable..." His eyes squinted as if being accosted by some blinding light in the moonlit room. "Will I be able to summon you again?"

"I will remain close, if that is what you wish. You need only say my name, I am David." I had dropped my own title with my death. "It has been my pleasure to meet you."

"Call me, Michael."

"Michael, this is a very noble endeavor indeed. To look beyond your own needs to attend to those of your sister, well it is..." I could not quite finish the sentence. I did not possess words appropriate enough to convey the significance of such a thing. Family had been something I had chosen to mostly ignore when I had been truly alive. That familiar sickness rolled through me, and I stood there looking like a damn fool dangling after some dratted word.

"Yes?" Michael questioned for the rest of my statement.

"Let me just say, I know what a gift it is. It is more, I daresay, than I ever did when I was among the living for anyone I loved or who tried to love me. I will come back if you need me."

I spent a moment watching him drift back into a fitful sleep. After all of that, I was still unsure as to why I had entered his room in the first place. I had heard his strangled cries from deep in the recesses of Baranack Hills and Holes, an exhausted limestone quarry I had chosen for a home. Considering it a strength, a debt to humanity, I had chosen to remain reclusive since becoming a vampire. Michael's agony had beckoned me to make his acquaintance. Maybe, I would never be able to explain the draw. However, when I came to his room, I had found him sleeping. When his travail finally awakened him, he did not startle or yell. Eyes, barely focused, found me; and in the absence of expected fear, I saw a measure of relief.

Neither could I explain why our conversation had provoked me to offer to take Michael's life for him. I had not it left in me tonight to wrestle with the issues of fate and morality, although I had already begun to do so despite myself.

Turning from him, I leapt out the third floor window I had entered through. On the pavements outside of the townhouse, I froze. I had seen his sister coming down the staircase at a speed dangerous for the length of her dressing gown on my way past the second floor window.

"Hell and blast! She could not have awoken and heard our quiet conversation. No, if she had she would have entered the room to find out who Michael was talking to." I spoke to the vacant outdoors, as I saw her light enter the ground floor. Although I knew I should run, my feet remained seemingly manacled by the fog. I watched the black shadow, so female in its curves, move into the entrance hall.

When the door opened, I moved as if I had been just walking at this hour of the morning.

"Please, wait." I heard her speak, but I continued my deuced charade anyway. "Pardon me, David, might I have a word with you too!"

I stopped dead in my tracks, a questionable choice given I could hurl myself through space at speeds great enough to avoid this encounter. Yet, her slightly alto female voice had uttered my name, the timbre of which played deeply inside of me swirling much like the frail mists. I turned to face the source.

"Pardon me?" I tried not to hiss out my words and to contain my glower.

"I apologize, but I heard you talking to Michael."

"That is not possible."

"I have made it a habit to wake every few hours and sit just outside his door. I was already there when you entered his room. You see, I do not wish to disturb his sleep, and sometimes it is simply comforting to hear him breathe. Also, I fear him needing me at some point, and not having the strength to call out for me. I castigated myself for listening to your most intimate words. Yet, your voice captured my rapt attention. You uttered such sympathetic and caring and kind... sorry, I am rambling." She had looked down at her own feet then, making the last of her omissions a whisper.

"Dash it all! What a devilish thing to do!" She looked up at me with a flush upon her cheeks shining through the tears dropping from her eyelids. At that moment, the galling ardor that had begun to simmer just below the surface was dowsed. I could smell her fear baiting me, making me crave the blood that kept me going.

"My intention was not to bedevil you," she continued on undaunted by my fit of temper. It is beyond me the reality that you are a vampire. Even having overheard your conversation, I still can not bring myself to believe it."

"I do not mean to shun you, my Lady, but it is not fitting for us to be talking here. The grim reality is there are other vampires near. I must hastily go before being seen with me gets you killed. I bespeak of you to conceal yourself safely back within your townhouse and to forget of what you overheard." I had not meant for my words to be so abrupt and brash, but I could sense more of my kind entering the vicinity.

As I turned to flee away from her, I continued to contemplate my personal hell. A hand on my back stopped me. I wheeled on her with my fearful ire quite visible.

"Blessed woman, you must get indoors!" My manners diverted, I pulled her warm body to mine and secured her into her townhouse hoping we had not been seen by a villain of the night. When she shivered, I realized I was holding her unthinking to my chilled skin.

"Please pardon me, but you should have listened. You could have been killed! I will not have your blood on my hands." Her hands were wrapped around her now, but she turned to look up at me with a steady countenance that was betrayed by the thrum of her heartbeats so audible to me.

"Why would a..." she hesitated, brooding, but looking directly into my eyes. I stepped back.

"A vampire," I inserted for her gruffly while bound by her intense stare.

"I daresay, you are being nonsensical. Why would another vampire want to kill me, but you do not?"

"The sober truth is but a tangled situation." I became abruptly distressed with the actuality of having a discussion with a non-dying mortal, a very much-alive female who had not realized in her haste to get to me her state of undress.

"Explain it to me. I have never had the pleasure of meeting a vampire before." The way she forced out the word vampire, as if such a thing were unbelievable, endeared her to me. "All I know of your kind is from the cautionary tales my grandmother used to spout off. We had thought her jawings were nothing but bubble-brained notions of dementia."

"I sense your fear of me," I scoffed because this vexed me as if she had decided to personally hate me. She stood with her hands on her hips now, but the quick rise and fall of her chest was more veracious. "If you heard me enter Michael's room why did you not enter?" The anticipation of her answer soon transformed the burn of my anger to a stomach-turning nausea.

"You offered to end his life for him peacefully." Tears started to form again cutting up my peace.

"Yes, please pardon my offer, but that does not explain why when you first heard us speaking you did not protect him from the obvious stranger. How did you think I had come about being in his room?"

"I do not know as if I can explain, except to say that it was your voice that kept me crouched where I was."

"The lure of the hunter. Many humans find our voices to be comforting or even mesmerizing. This ensures you will speak with us when we want you."

Her eyes grew wide from fear or excitement. I could not be sure which, and I did not wish to entertain either.

"It is of no moment. Listen, Margaret, I was not trying to take him away from you. His pain has become mostly intolerable, and his strength is being exhausted by his continual hectic fever. My apologies, you do not need me to tell you of his condition do you?"

"If you are a vampire," she continued while watching her toes curl under the hem of her nightgown as if I had not spoken, "could you not offer him a different life while ending the pain of this one?"

Her bloodshot eyes pleading with mine began to squelch the anger that flared up so quickly in me. She was asking me to turn him. She was asking me to kill him and make him suffer for eternity as a creature like me. Gads, no sure-witted man would say she had not an ounce of steel in her.

"What bandy words? You should be wishing me to perdition for trying to take him from you, not asking me to condemn him to one of the living dead!" Although calmer, I had lost the battle to restrain the venom in my words.

"He would not feel pain anymore. He would live forever."

"He would have to learn to take a life to sustain his. Tis foolish beyond permission to think that he would fit back into your life. Damnation! Did you not think when you came after me that I might just drain you, since I did not drink him?"

"If that was to be the scrape I got myself into, I did not care. I have so few options left." She stood there sullen biting at her plump bottom lip making the contrast between the red and white even greater. "The way you spoke to him made me trust you, made me think that the legends and stories were wrong. A killer does not speak to his victim the way you spoke to my brother. Your soft voice was so soothing. Your words were unbelievably kind and understanding of his plight. You sounded less of a monster than half of the nodcock men that have boasted of the powers of their medicine over him, and yet failed to help him. It matters not a snatch what becomes of me. I will soon be much alone in the world anyway. It is his suffering now that matters. I would bargain with the black spy if I could take his illness and suffer his death for him. He is too young, and has much to live for."

Damned woman tugs at my heart and then walks up to me so close that I could feel the heat of her skin on mine, presumably tempting me to kill her. I stood stagnant once she laid her palm tentatively upon my chest. The smell of her burned through my nose, as her hand incinerated my flesh with its human warmth. I could feel her pulse bumping against the hollow spot where my dead heart laid.

I breathed deep watching her hand move with my lungs as I gasped for purchase upon the air to speak. Her hands fell away as my words began. "There is never any way of telling once transformed, what a vamp will be like. Some go crazy after their first kill becoming murderers and living off of humans like addicts. Others retain some of the personality they had when they were living. Some, like me, cannot stomach the outcome of our dark desires. Even killing an animal displeases me, although a abominable necessity I daresay."

I scoffed trying to redirect my ardor and my thoughts before I continued. "Vampires are riddled with human lore, some true and some laughable. In actuality, we are as different from one another as the mortal race is. Of course, the variations between us all are not so black and white. Each of us are trying to reconcile the soulless life we were given with our instincts and our personalities from the real life that was taken from us." Only, I had come to see my human-like traits as a penance—a sentence of suffering for what I no longer had the chance to change, what I could no longer have.

Since her stubborn look had not softened, I offered my supposition. "You would be wagering too much. You could still lose him, but have condemned him to an evil life. You would be taking away any chance of redemption, if he were to be destroyed. All of that aside, it would not be fitting for me personally to turn someone without their absolute consent. Do you think he would gladly agree with you? I would take death, if I were offered the choice."

This time both of her hands came up to singe my chest. Instinct had me lifting my hands to cover hers. Inches from touching the soft skin on the back of her hands, I stopped.

"I almost forgot how cold my hands were." I let my hands fall hard and lifeless back down to my sides. Her touch was baffling. I waited for the urge to kill that would send me out of this situation, but it did not come as harshly as I had expected it to. Instead, I was besieged by the urge to kiss her.

"I would not have minded. Do go on?" She rubbed me slightly as if comforting me. A mix of anger and lust growled deep within.

"You are right to fear me."

"But, I do not." Her breath blew across my face holding me, luring me in as her prey. I clamped down tight to my urges to take her mouth. My fiendish tendencies to join with a woman and to feed from her were often one and the same -- the lure of the erotic, bloodlust. Many vampires seduce their victims into bed only to drain them immediately following the culmination of the act.

"Your pulse says differently." I stepped back making her hands fall.

"Do not leave," her voice demanded. I could see how she had managed on her own these past years. She was a steely article.

There was something about her that I could not say no to. Confusion stood out foremost in my mind. The hunger I understood, the often-erotic pull of it I got too. Yet, there was something else about her that drew me in, and made me turn my back on my instincts. I did not want to leave her, but I feared I was putting her in danger by staying. What if I acted on my impulses as a man, and I lost all ability to fight the vampire? As these thoughts raced through my head, her eyes stayed on me. I finally stalked to a couch in her living room right under the front window, as if the proximity to an escape route would help.

"I get you do not care for being a vampire," she stammered.

"I am besotted by the fact that you do not care for the word either. But, no, I do not like this sentence I was given."

"How did you get this way? I mean how were you turned?"

"Wrong place...wrong time."

"There has to be more to it than that. Is it a painful memory?"

"No, not exactly. It angers me, and I am trying hard to keep control around you." I kept watching her chest breath. I envied her, so alive, until she caught me ogling her. "I apologize. You are making me envy your life, each breath and each beat of your heart are so audible to me."

"How long have you been this way?" The blood that rushed to her cheeks told me she had heard my apology.

"I was four and twenty when I was turned about ten years ago. I guess that takes away the romance of me being from another time and having lived this way for hundreds of years. It must kill some of the mysticism of my lure."

"Who were you before?" She was a persistent gel of a woman. I was enticed by her strength more than I should have been. I tried to unclench my fists and relax for her, but with her I had never hated what I was more.

"I was a libertine, a member of the ton who shirked his duties and kept to gentleman's hours. My late nights were for pleasures best kept from a lady's ears. I shunned my noblesse oblige making sure I was not what I was born and bred to be. I kept time with hen-witted wenches. One night, a tempting armful bit me. She drained me and left. Only, she left me under the light of the first full moon of the month which turned me into a vampire."

"A Byronic hero of sorts without all of the gothic gore."

"A hero, I can assure you I am not." Although I understood her meaning, I hoped my play off of the words would divert her from her questioning.

"I know you sounded like a hero to my brother. Nevertheless, what was your title? As you have so far pardon my forwardness, I must ask, how did you change or stay the same after being turned?"

My body tightened more with my obligation to not cut her direct. "Ten years ago, I was the heir apparent to the Duke of Ardin. I was David Ardington IV, but when I awoke after being bitten I knew I was different. I remembered my own death. The smell of life nearby made my mouth water. Back out in the dark alleyways, I was lured to the living in a new way. I pounced on an unsuspecting mortal. When I was done, a wave of sickness washed over me as I stood over the lifeless body. I want you to be aware of the truth of the thief you have in your home. I have stolen life. So you see, I am indeed a monster."

"You are no monster. You were set to be a Duke."

"I am no longer. I shunned the sacred obligations of the peerage when I was alive. I did not concern myself with the vast estates and investments that I was to become responsible for then. I did not serve God, King, Country or even my family." I bore down on my tirade.

"Something must have changed since your first night as a vampire?"

"I met others like me in the hills beyond the city where I was hiding out. They were all different of course, and I tried many different ways to handle this life. To make my long story shorter, I got to the point where I can exist. I found I could survive on little blood if I chose to conserve my strength. I hunt animals only when necessary." I stopped, not wishing to discuss this any further. "Your brother was too frail to speak much. Tell me what happened to him and to your parents to leave you both in such a fix."

Her back stiffened, and I could see in her expression she was sorting through her memories. It was hard to maintain my distance from her in the silence with her skin smelling of Warren and Rosser's Milk of Roses. The distinct aroma of rose water and sweet almonds reminded me of my days as a rake. With no powders to conceal her skin, I could see that the beauty product delivered on its promises. Her complexion was a delicate ivory color except for the warmth which showed in her cheeks from the fire.

"I was approaching my debut when my parents were killed in a carriage accident. We know little of the why or how. Michael succeeded my father as Viscount. He did well caring for me and our holdings and our servants. I was in no mind to come-out, and he did not push. At the time, there was still enough time for that. Only he had been ignoring an indolent growth on his side allowing it to increase and corrupt other parts of his body. By the time he called upon a doctor, the skin over it had gone from red to black, and it was too late to extirpate it with a knife. The doctor called it occult cancer, a disease that has long baffled men of medicine."