AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The vampire had chosen him. Once she sank her fangs into his skin, he would have everything that he wanted…. He would experience the Sacred Kiss again…. His body needed it…. He wanted it so much….
He closed his eyes.
The vampire’s breath was hot and smelled like cigarettes; it was like kissing an ashtray, and the pungent smell took him away from the moment.
“Whatever you’re about to do. It’s not going to help.”
He blinked and saw a gentle, kind face looking at him.
Who was she? Freya, he remembered. She was worried about him. Freya was so beautiful, more beautiful than the vampire in his lap, whose looks were mere glamour, a sad façade hiding a wretched interior. Freya glowed with an incandescent light. She had a spark in her eyes. She had told him not to do this.
What was he doing?
Why was he here?
Then he remembered…the blood house. Wait. What had he done? He could live with the sorrow of losing her. He could live with missing…who was he missing? He couldn’t remember…but then with a jolt all his memories came flooding back. It was as if he were waking up. He felt alive again. He could live with the pain. But he would never forgive himself for doing this. He could not forget. He would not. He would never forget…Schuyler…
Schuyler.
Freya.
Schuyler.
The vampire bit his neck and fell back, screaming, her face scarred by the acid in his blood. “Poison! Poison! He is still marked!”
Oliver ran out of the room as fast as he could.
THREE
Cleaning Up
It was close to four in the morning when he returned to the Holiday. Freya was standing behind the bar, hitting the side of a cocktail glass with a knife. “Last call. Last call, everyone.” When she saw Oliver, she smiled. “You’re back.” She studied his face. “You didn’t do it.”
“No. I…almost did.” He did not wonder anymore how she knew where he had been or what he had been about to do. “I didn’t because I was thinking of you.”
“Good boy.” She smiled as she pointed toward the utility closet. “Come on, help me clean up. A little elbow grease will make you feel better. Then I’ll let you walk me home.”
Oliver took a broom and began to sweep the floor and pick up the plastic straws and soggy napkins that had fallen there. He helped wipe down the counter and dry the glasses. He stacked them neatly on the back shelves. Freya was right: the physical labor made him feel better.
The last of the regulars stumbled out, and the two of them were left alone. He looked around, realizing that over the years he had never seen anyone work here but Freya. How did one tiny girl keep the whole place together?
When the bar was tidied and clean, Freya shrugged on a green army flak jacket, oversized and gigantic on her small frame. It was the kind of jacket worn by Special Forces teams parachuting into jungles, and it looked incongruous against her delicate features, which made the whole effect even more charming. She pulled up the hood to cover her hair. “Come on, I’m just down the street.”
On the way to her apartment, Freya stopped by the Korean grocer on the corner. She chose a bouquet of flowers, two tubs of fresh fruit, and a spray of mint. Unlike the usual lackluster offerings found at the corner deli, everything Freya touched seemed to glow: the strawberries red and succulent, the melons shone with orange intensity. The mint smelled like it had just been picked from a field in Provence.
She led him to a shabby tenement building with a broken front door. “We didn’t get the gentrification memo,” she joked. He followed her up the stairs to the third landing. It had four doors, and she opened the one painted red. “Thank goodness I face out to the street. Those two over there just look at the courtyard.”
It was a small apartment by anyone’s standards, but in terms of New York real estate, even tinier still. There was an old-fashioned claw-foot tub in the middle of the room and a minuscule galley kitchen with aging appliances. Against the window was a four-poster bed draped with a paisley print tapestry. But once Oliver entered the room, he was startled to find it was not as small as it had looked from the doorway. He had been mistaken. The apartment was large and magnificent, with a library full of books on one side and a proper formal dining room on the other.
“Sit,” she said, pointing to a grand settee that he was certain had not been there before.
There were ancestral portraits on the wall, and what looked like museum-quality art. Was that a Van Dyck? That one was surely a Rembrandt. The usual bohemian squalor had vanished, and instead Oliver was sitting on a proper couch in an elegantly furnished living room with a cracking fireplace. The windows to the fire escape still looked out onto Avenue C, but Oliver could swear he heard the ocean.
Freya disappeared into the back bedroom to change (again, he hadn’t seen it from the doorway—and what happened to the four-poster bed? And the claw-foot tub? Was he losing his mind?). When she returned she was wearing flannel pajamas. She fired up the stove—a sleek industrial design and not the old and ugly white one he had seen from the doorway—and began to crack eggs. “You need breakfast,” she murmured as she chopped the mint.
A delicious buttery smell began to waft from the kitchen, and after a few minutes, Freya placed two plates on the table in the little breakfast nook. By this time, Oliver had accepted the fact that the apartment was not quite what it was, and he was no longer surprised by the appearance of yet another cozy and beautiful piece of furniture. Was this a dream? If so, he wanted to keep sleeping.
Oliver took a bite. The eggs were soft and creamy, and the mint gave them a sharp and interesting taste. He finished the whole thing in three bites.
