AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Which would you like first? Shot or chaser?”
“Blood before wine, as they say.”
I pour us a glass of blood and clink mine against his.
“To your new gift,” I tell him.
He stares at me blankly for a moment then smiles. “Toyournew gift. I hope you enjoy her.”
“And I hope you enjoy this,” I tell him, tapping the side of my glass with my finger before finishing the blood in one go. I’ve never been one for restraint and this blood is impossible to resist.
Van Helsing takes a sniff and then a tepid sip and I nearly laugh. I’ve had blood with the good doctor before, so I know he still partakes in it, but it still amuses me to see how much he fights his natural instinct to want blood. The pills only do so much. There’s a real thirst inside of all of us vampires, one that can only really be quenched by the blood of a living human. Those that stick only to pills look gaunt and ashy, and deep down inside they know they’re denying the most primal and basic part of themselves by abstaining from the fresh stuff.
Like Van Helsing here. The moment the blood hits his lips there’s a chemical change. I smell it on him, I see it on him. His eyes light right up like fireworks. He has another sip, a little bigger now, his hands starting to shake, and then suddenly he’s gulping the rest of the glass down. When he’s done, red is running down his chin and he looks ravenous.
“There’s the doctor I know,” I exclaim, pouring us both another glass. “That’s the one they called Jack the Ripper. Do you remember those days, old boy?”
He gives me a steady look before wiping the blood off his chin with his finger and then licking it clean. “Ido,” he says carefully, implying that I don’t.
Memory is a funny subject for us. There’s a lot of things that we’ve experienced together that I don’t remember. I’m guessing that when I had my memory wiped of the woman from my past, Dahlia, that a lot of events that involved the both of them disappeared. For example, once he talked about a play we had seen in London’s West End, but I had no memory of it. Later he said that the woman was there with us, going by the name of Lucy at the time, which made me realize that by erasing her I had erased countless other things.
Sometimes I fear they were important things.
But we don’t talk about what I went to such lengths to forget. I know her name was Dahlia and she had been reincarnated over and over. I know her other names from her other lives are Mina and Lucy, only because of Bram Stoker. I know I had loved her so much, and that too much death led to too much pain. At this point in my life I don’t feel pain, so I can’t even fathom it, but I know that I had to have been suffering in order to do something so drastic. Which is why it’s not a subject I ever talk about, let alone think about.
It doesn’t matter anyway. What’s done is done. She’s dead, whoever she was, and I have moved on in the only way I knew how. They say that grief is a thief of time because the pain of loss not only steals so much from the heart but so much fromlife. People lose months, years, decades of their lives to mourning. It is utterly unfair and I am grateful I don’t have to lose anymore.
“So where did you get this blood from? Dare I ask?” Van Helsing says, reaching for the bottle.
“If I told you, you wouldn’t like it.”
He grimaces and puts the bottle back down. “Oh please. Don’t say this belongs to a child or something.”
“I’m not sure,” I admit with a shrug. “I doubt it. But what I do know is that I’m only brought the blood of the most, shall we say, succulent humans.”
He stares at me for a moment then shakes his head. “Right. Brought. By your little friend. You’re right, I didn’t want to know that.” He pours us both another glass and licks his lips appreciatively before he catches himself, looking guilty. He clears his throat. “Let me guess, you’ve got it trained like a dog now?”
Oh, how I wish, I think, and I don’t dare say that out loud in case the demon is near. Even with vampire senses, the creature is invisible to me when it wants to be, and yet it seems to hear and see everything I do.
“Let’s just say that sometimes it offers me a gift, much like you’re doing tonight,” I explain. “A way to make amends, or perhaps a way to get closer, to make me let my guard down. A way to take advantage with a little buttering up.”
I squint at him as he swallows his drink, wondering if that’s actually what he’s doing here. The years have made my mind always jump to the worst conclusions, paranoid of even my dearest of friends. It’s a potentially fatal flaw I can’t seem to shake.
He raises his empty glass as a plea for more. “Well if you feel like buttering me up...”
I pour us both another glass and we toast before finishing the blood. Every cell inside me feels nourished and alive and I relish it. It’s really the only time that I feel much of anything. I have my fits of rage and bitterness, but the blood soothes and calms like nothing else can. Except for a good fuck or two.
“So, tell me about this Rose,” I ask him, feeling satisfied enough to move onto the wine. “Why did you really bring her?”
“I thought you could use a vampire for once,” he says as I uncork the bottle of vintage red and pour him a glass, the burgundy swirling with the bright tinge of the leftover blood in the glass.
“And why is that?”
“You’re a little rough with the humans,” he explains with a wince.
“It’s notmewho is rough with them,” I say, feeling mildly defensive as I sit back down. “Not always.”
“Either way, it’s been a long time since any of them left this place alive. You know that I invented those pills to help humans too, right? It wasn’t sitting right with me to be leading so many of them like sheep to the slaughter.”
