Late in the day in the City

Author: Damiana

Date: 06-25-03 08:36

Damiana had always been an early riser. As a mortal, she had always awoken before it was light out; now, less than 51 years into her immortality, she found herself awake every day early enough to spend an hour and a half watching the shadows change on the walls as the sun went down. Not much fun, but she had to look at it as a possible advantage. She had few enough of those, to be sure. She had to admit to herself that she hadn't been doing such a great job as a Vampire so far. Partly to blame was her youth and inexperience, but even more, her lack of guidance was what she was really beginning to regret.

She thought back to the night when she had first met Alice, her Sire. She had been 'people watching' in a bar, the way she usually spent her time when the nights were too cold or too lonely for birding. Always more of a nocturnal creature herself than the raptorial species of birds that she so loved to watch, she had gotten into the habit of moving her observations of 'the hunters' to the bars and dance clubs of the city. And that had been how she had both found Alice, and been noticed, targeted by her. She'd looked to be about Damiana's same age, and had known a bit about hunting herself. She had seemed fascinated by Damiana, and for about a year, they would meet at various places to watch the crowds and their goings-on. When they had first met, Damiana's first impulse had been to watch her new companion instead of the crowd, and she often wondered how things would have turned out had she done so. "I'm Alice." She had said one night, after just walking up to Damiana out of nowhere. She sat beside her at the table and the two just sat, sometimes sharing observations on this one or that one, each of them occasionally taking a sip from their glass of water. It wasn't until the evening was over and the bar was closing that Damiana actually got a good look at her. Alice was tall and fair-skinned, with honey-blonde hair and clear blue eyes. "Alice is it?" Damiana had said, "just like in the story, I suppose." Alice had just smiled her sad smile, waved and walked away. Unknown to Damiana, that same sad smile was upon her own lips as she thought of her Sire. She really had been the Alice from the story-books, and never being able to forget it, having those constant reminders of her mortal life as a child had been what had finally driven her insane. She had stayed at home, or near to it for decades, she had told Damiana on the night that she had re-created her. She had seen all of her beloved friends and family members die off one by one. Once, shortly before her Sire gave her up as a lost cause and deserted her, she had gone to the house of "Mr. Carroll" (as she still referred to him,) and revealed herself. As a means of dealing with his new knowledge, the old man had depended ever more on his drugs, and eventually had died of an overdose, right before the eyes of his dear Alice. She had left England then, and come to the United States, wandered for a few years before settling down in the City, and staying strictly to herself. She'd been able to feel the madness closing in on her, she had said, and to stave it off, had begun looking for a companion, someone she could share her immortality with. That someone had been Damiana.

It had been a memorable night, for many reasons. Alice had chosen well, Damiana would not be missed by anyone save a very few bartenders and bouncers, the radio was broadcasting a practical joke about aliens by a relatively unknown man named Orson Wells, and if she ran screaming for help, no one would be likely to stop, or take her at all seriously. The entire City was preoccupied with thoughts of invasion, all save a few, and two of those few were Alice and her new Chylde. Over the nights to come, they had sat in each other's company often just staring at the smaller, finer details of each other. Before long, word had gotten around that the two were lovers, and rather than risk discovery of the truth, the two women had simply 'disappeared' one night. They had moved from City to City for the next two decades until towards the end of the 70's, Alice had begun to get worse again. She became increasingly jealous and demanding of Damiana's time, while at the same time that she was demanding that her Chylde be at her side, she didn't want to be touched, or spoken to, or even looked at. On the less and less frequent instances when Damiana would leave to hunt for the two of them, upon her return Alice would rave and shriek about what would happen to Damiana should she ever try leaving her Sire, about the things that Alice would do to her should she ever catch her around other Vampires, about what another Vampire would do to Damiana, should they ever find out that she had deserted her Sire when her Sire had needed her. And then later still would be the tear-filled apologies, the agonized beggings for forgiveness, the promises to make it all up to her somehow. Their last few years together Damiana had spent in a whirlwind of anger, tears and remorse.

It had been going on for some time, after the jealous rages had worn off and Alice would contritely take Damiana's offering of supper for the night, she would beg her to kill her, and to please forgive her. She never paid much attention to Alice when she got that way, always assuming that she was just being dramatic. Alice never left their home anymore, and Damiana had been wearing herself thin hunting for the both of them. She would hunt her own supper first, take care of the body, and then find a suitable meal for Alice. She found herself taking the biggest and strongest men she could find, mesmerizing them so thoroughly that they often were still staring lovingly at her when their eyes slipped closed for the last time as Alice fed. It was almost as if she had believed that the blood of the strongest and best specimens of the mortals could shore up the weak and failing walls of sanity in her beloved Sire's mind. And then came the night when Alice attacked her.

They had just moved to San Francisco, and Damiana's first hunt had been outside of an odd club that was attended only by men. She had taken one of the young ones, his skin still soft and smooth with the last remaining years of childhood, his attempt at a beard still downy and boy-like. She had grabbed ahold of his mind unmercifully and found a tenderness there that she was unused to in males. As she fed upon him, she explored this new mind, and at last came to understand. What the club was, what the boy was, and possibly, what could save Alice. As his mind was new to her, so was the taste of the boy's blood. At once vigorous and strong as male blood always was, it also had the delicacy and sweetness of the blood that she had taken from her female victims. Neither masculine nor feminine, but both, Damiana had had to restrain herself from entering the club and giving in to her desire to taste and touch and devour every single patron. Instead, she had made herself wait until another like her young one came along. This time, she beat back her desire to explore the tenderness of his mind and harshly crushed the boy's will tying it to her own, and guiding him to the house that she shared with Alice. "I am home, my darling, and have I got a real treat for you!" she said. But Alice was nowhere to be seen. "Alice?" She called through the echoing, cavernous darkness, "Alice?" And then suddenly she was there, and before Damiana had a chance to defend herself, she felt the fangs in her neck, felt her Sire's nails and teeth tearing at her, felt the bite take hold and the enormous pressure as her body itself fought the attack, trying to heal the damage as it was being done, felt the searing pain as her throat was ripped open, and her blood foamed out of her like a geyser. She watched in a haze of anguish and despair as her beloved Sire thrust her face into the fountaining stream of blood and began to drain her dry, as the fountain ebbed, and her frenzied face got ever closer to Damiana's own, she could feel her own death coming upon her, and the part of her that had so welcomed the change from mortal girl to Vampire and huntress rose up within her screaming out it's desire to live. And as Alice finally came back to herself, enough to see and realize what she had done, Damiana grabbed hold of her by her hair, pulled her head up, and sank her own fangs into her Sire's throat. She drained her as completely as she could, and then sat with her, as night became day, and Alice, smiling her sad smile, closed her eyes for the last time. When she was certain that her Sire was truly asleep, or maybe had slipped into a state of torpor, with her last remaining strength, Damiana had ripped the head from her body, and with what she recognized as the last of her mortal impulses fleeing away, recited the Catholic prayer for tormented souls over the lifeless body of her darling, Alice.

She had released the boy's mind enough for him to bring her one of his friends to feed on that night, and the next, and with her strength regained, she had ordered him to arrange a few things for her. On the third night after Alice's death, she and the boy had gone to the cemetery where a headstone that said simply 'Alice' was standing. Together they had dug the grave, and placed what was left of Damiana's sire within. They had buried her and left her there. Damiana had taken the boy out on the Bridge, drained him, and then dropped the lifeless shell that was left of him over the side. Then she turned her back, completed her crossing and left San Francisco for good.

She wandered alone for years, never finding a home, never stopping in one place for too long, watching the crowds of people come and go, watching the times change. Looking for company while at the same time wanting only to stay outside of it she had embraced various movements in the music world, preying on those most frenzied of converts, moving from the world and crowds of punk to metal to grunge to industrial to nu-metal; craving the driving rhythms the crushing guitars, the angry shrieking of the lyrics. On several concert circuits she was a minor mosh-pit legend, slam-dancing (and doing serious damage while at it) but never picking up so much as a scratch. When people showed up missing after concerts, no one asked too many questions, after all, there always were a few. When bodies started showing up torn and mutilated and in some cases dismembered, stories began to get around that someone was stalking the concertgoers, but the party went on. At last, for Damiana at least, the party ended. She'd had a rather spectacular meltdown at a Korn* concert of all places, and found herself weeping in the toilet of the green room after the concert. She'd gotten ahold of herself, cleaned up as much as she could, and poked her head out into the band's dressing room. It looked as if a tornado had hit it, and for the first time, Damiana realized that for perhaps as many as the last twenty years, she had been blacking out on a regular basis. "Who's Alice?" Fieldy had asked her. She smiled at him and told him not to worry. "You won't be seeing me again."

As she left the City (Chicago it had been,) she considered her options. The first she had thought of was suicide, she could sit and watch the sunrise, but that seemed particularly unattractive to her. It just wasn't in her to give up. She thought about just going into hiding somewhere, holing up and not coming out again for as much as another twenty years, but that also was too much like giving up. She wandered for weeks, trying and failing to rest during the days, traveling at night. She fed infrequently, when she remembered to feed at all, and realized that as much as she hated to admit it, that she was slowly starving herself to death. Then, one night in a bar as she was looking for someone good to eat, she had seen a man that had so powerfully brought back to her her memories of her self that she had needed to sneak away, out of the bar, out of the light, out of the very proximity of all the things that over the years she had lost.

When she had come out of hiding a few weeks later, she began to actively hunt for him, finding the places that he would go, the people that he spoke to, watching him and watching the people that he watched. Finally she could stand it no longer. She would take him.

It had seemed so simple at the time. She lured him into a corner of the bar, bought him a couple of drinks. Not wanting to interfere overmuch with who he was, she had resisted the urge to grab hold of his mind and force him to be docile and amenable, relying instead on his curiosity. It didn't take long before she had gotten him out of the bar, and then in her eagerness, she had gotten careless. She had drained him, and the exchange of bloods had been complete. She had brought him a little girl she had found on the streets earlier that night, half-starved and homeless, the poor thing had still enough pride in herself to keep herself clean, a fitting first meal for a new fledgling, Damiana had thought. She had opened the neck of the girl and pushed her Chylde's head down so that he could drink, when they had been discovered. She had panicked, and rushed at the men who had found them, and thinking only of the preservation of their lives had led them away, led them to their deaths, and then been caught by the dawn. With no choice but to take to the sewers and wait out the day, she was unable to sleep, in an agony of guilt and self-recrimination. She waited, as impatiently as a hungry tiger for the sun to go down. She left much earlier than was wise, and had done herself quite a bit of harm wandering about in the dying rays of the sun, but she did not care. She crossed the City to where she had left him, Zalen, and found him gone. There were two chalk outlines, and yellow police tape strung across the entrance to the alleyway where they had been found. She had not gotten all of them away from him it seemed, and now he was dead. In her desperation for companionship, she had done something that she had never dared before and sought out others like herself. "Oh, so he's yours is he?" one of them had asked one night after she had told him of her current troubles, and that had been how she had discovered that her Chylde was yet alive.

She shook her head and snapped herself out of her reverie. The sun was down and true night had fallen at last. She had to hunt, and then hunt again. She needed to find her lost Chylde.

***

The Hunt

Author: Damiana

Date: 06-26-03 13:48

Not knowing how long or how far she would have to travel, Damiana gorged herself that night. The other Vampires had not known where Zalen had gone, only that he had been wandering, alone and seemingly without the knowledge of who or what he was anymore. There was only one point in her favor, that they seemed more amused by her predicament, than angered. And although none of them was certain when he had been in the City last, Damiana was quite aware that it had been weeks, not days before she had completely healed from the damage she had done herself running around unprotected in the sunlight. While she had thought him dead, there had been no reason to hurry, and she somehow knew that she was quite a few days behind him, at the very least. And so she hunted, fed and over-fed, not intending to stop for more than a day's rest until she found him. If her recent experience of the sun had been any less damaging, she might even have tried traveling by day instead of resting, but the burns and welts that had covered her for days after that particular experience had made her timid, and she no longer left her hiding places until well after dark.

After gluttonously devouring five victims, she started out. She left the City and stood under the stars waiting, feeling the cool of the night, smelling the air, embraced by the wind. Finally she turned and began walking, not sure even of what direction that she was traveling in, just following the one direction that 'felt' right. She traveled unthinkingly, unseen by any but the other denizens of the evening. Moving with an unnatural speed and grace, she was finally caught by the telltale grey of the coming dawn. She stopped, picked a spot in the lee of a large tree, and dug herself a hole beneath its roots to lie in during the passing day. Exhausted, and a little sick from overeating, she fell into a deep coma-like sleep.

But now that she knew that her Chylde was out there and still alive, now that she knew he would be in need of her, much of her trepidation regarding the sun was being replaced by impatience. She was up excruciatingly early, and the waiting for the sun to disappear beyond the horizon was maddening. She waited, in her hole in the ground, and when at last she left the safety of the sheltering tree, she started out at a run, in minutes leaving the tree miles behind her.

She was traveling mostly over farmland that night, and the next two. Country that was largely empty of any but the simplest of field life, mice and voles and wild dogs and feral cats, owls and bats soaring above them all. Occasionally as the days passed, she would see people out in the fields, holding Wiccan rituals, looking at the stars, making love, tipping over cows, but she always steered clear of them.

She traveled this way for days, digging holes to sleep in at dawn, traveling at a run all night, avoiding the few people that she did see as she traveled, making her way either around or straight through the cities and towns that she came across, St. Louis growing ever more distant behind her, the shame at losing her Chylde decreasing as well, as she felt herself to be coming closer and closer to him. On the sixth night of travel, she began to be plagued by hunger pangs, but rather than stop, the same 'feeling' that she had been following from the very beginning of her journey drove her onward, causing her to further exert herself in the effort to reach her destination. When the dawn came, she very nearly screamed aloud in frustration at the thought that she would have to stop, she was so close! Stubbornly, she continued on, risking her health, gambling with the rays of the rising sun. Just as the first really painful blast of light hit her, she found the train yards, and the warehouses. Knowing that she was really pushing her luck now, she took her time selecting her hiding place, not wanting to be discovered. She sat, staring at the sun-shadows on the wall, unable to rest, waiting for the dusk.

When night finally came, and Damiana was able to leave the warehouse, she tried to take up the loping stride that had gotten her so far, but the pain of her enforced fasting came back to her so severely that for a few moments, she was unable to stand. She would have to hunt, and feed. She walked, as much as she wanted to run, she made herself walk. Before too long, she found a couple out sitting on a park bench, enjoying the reflection of the moon on the playing water in the fountain that was before them. Damiana reached the bench, sat down beside them, and very shortly thereafter, accompanied the two to their home. She showered and dressed in the woman's clothes, ordered them into the still wet bathtub, where she had everything ready. The man held his wife as she slit first one wrist and then the other, feeding the half-starved Vampiress until her own life ebbed away, and then he did the same. Sated on their blood, Damiana left the two bodies to be found, taking from the house only her own tattered clothing, and those items that she wore from the woman's closet.

She noticed that she could 'feel' the same guiding influence that had brought her all the long way out here, and turned into the wind, no longer running as if afraid that it would be snatched away from her, but calmly, composedly walking, as if certain now, of her destination. And before too long, she found herself trekking comfortably and nearly silently through the woods, breaking through the last line of trees, and coming upon the Manor.

She knocked on the door.

***