Blood Vivicanti (9780989878586) (6 page)

But before I got to their
house I saw Nell, the Pale Girl I’d seen with the Dark Man,
Lowen.

I noticed her because she
was watching me. No one saw me unless I let them see me. But she
saw me.

Lowen was nowhere in sight.
And I could not smell him or hear him either.

Nell recognized me, perhaps
she also remembered me from the fifth grade. But she appeared to
know that I was a monster. She had no fear of me at all.

She smiled at me. She waved
at me to follow her. She turned from me. She went skipping
away.

I followed her.

She didn’t have Blood
Vivicanti speed or strength. But she was elusive. She could hide
herself from me.

If I lost her, she would
appear from behind a house or tree, far ahead, waving for me to
follow her farther.

She led me through
Idyllville. She led me through the forest, around tree and
rock.

She led me to the cliff
where it all began, the place where Wyn had saved me from the two
men – Lowen’s Sleeper Devils. It was the place where I’d fallen and
broken, the place where Wyn had pierced me, where he’d saved me,
where I started to become the monster that I became.

Nell was on the edge of the
cliff, balancing, walking back and forth on it like a
tightrope.

She turned and faced me,
her toes on the edge, her heels poised over the fall.

Her voice was high and soft
and gentle. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

No one had ever been
waiting for me.

She tilted her head to one
side. She pulled her collar away from her neck, exposing the sweet
spot on her throat.

“
Pierce me,” she said.
“Drink from me, Blood Vivicanti.”

I was amazed. How could she
know me?

“
You’re a monster,” she
said.

I was under the assumption
that only Theo, Wyn, and Ms. Crystobal knew about the Blood
Vivicanti.

Nell smiled at me, trying
to be coquettish, but she seemed too pitiable. “A ghost told me
about you.”

“
You speak with ghosts?” I
asked.

“
Only one ghost.”

“
Who would want a monster
like me to drink their blood?”

“
I don’t want you
to.”

“
Then why are you offering
yourself to me?”

“
I need to.”

“
Do you want my venom to
make you feel better?”

“
I need to feel
something.”

I understood how she felt.
“You poor thing.”

She nodded sadly. “I am a
thing.”

Nell put her face in her
hands. She began weeping. “I’m not your friend,” she
said.

“
That hurt,” I
said.

“
Feeling hurt is feeling
something.”

“
I’d like to be your
friend,” I said.

Nell looked at me through
the divide of her fingers. A horrible sound came from her throat. I
couldn’t tell if it was laughing or wheezing.

“
You covet me,” she
said.

“
I covet much.”

“
You shouldn’t pity what you
covet. You should have it.”

Nell took her hands from
her face.

“
Have me,” she said. “If I
give you my self, then I’m a gift to you.”

I was stunned. I didn’t
know how to respond.

She pointed to her neck –
the sweet spot.

“
Pierce me,” she said again.
“Drink me.”

Much was going on inside
me. I was thinking of Joe and his family. I was thinking of Theo
and Wyn.

Ages zero to seventeen had
been a life of making the best decisions for a girl trying to
survive the thoughtlessness of others. But now that I had the power
to move mountains, all my decisions had seemed so reckless while I
struggled to survive crossing the threshold from girlhood to
womanhood.

The urge to pierce Nell was
as small as a grain of sand compared to all my other thoughts and
feelings. Yet this urge was the lust of my body. I didn’t lust for
blood, only for escape. It was the animal of my self-control that I
fed until it consumed me. And I fed my self-control until my self
lost control. My lust overpowered my reason.

I prowled closer to
Nell.

She waited for me, showing
only one emotion, not fear, not worry, just the phlegmatic
acceptance of a courtesan who had a job to do.

I leaned close to her
neck.

Her skin smelled like
ice.

I opened my mouth. My
Probiscus extended from the tip of my tongue. Wave upon wave of
pleasure rolled down my throat and into my stomach.

The tip of my tongue
touched her neck. Then my bee stinger pierced her skin. The flesh
opened. The muscles widened. In slipped my tongue. Out flowed her
blood. I drove down deep into her neck.

Nell’s blood tasted
ice-cold.

Her Blood Memories were a
black hole.

She had no heartbeat. She
had only one thought…
Pain!
That’s all she felt – pure pain – the torment of
the damned. So that’s all she fed me.

Into my mouth poured the
brink of brokenness and the breadth of woundedness, the edge of
rejection and the cut of replacement.

Nell was a creature bred to
be forgotten, alone, and lonely. She was the furthest form of the
thing I could have become.

And now she was inside me,
her blood, her Blood Memories. Who she was was flowing through my
veins. How she was was feeding my sinews and my spirit. I could not
vomit up all the agony that I’d already swallowed down.

I released Nell. I fell to
the ground.

I couldn’t breathe. I
grabbed my throat.

The Pacific Ocean with her
powerful waves had not been able to drown me. But the gentle
current of Nell’s blood smothered my every attempt at
breath.

The stream of her
consciousness was a vast expanse of emptiness and
sorrow.

Yet one image lived in
Nell’s blood like a cancer. The image was of the man I’d seen with
her – the Dark Man.

Lowen.

Lowen was laughing at me in
her Blood Memories. His cruel laughter filled the void of Nell’s
existence.

He hated her. He hated
me.

Now his laughter was
filling my last thoughts as I suffered the suffocation that lurks
within the woeful mind of an abused girl.

To be continued…

Coming next in

The Blood
Vivicanti

Part 4

I sat up in my bed,
surrounded by my countless pillows. How did I get into
bed?

I could not
recall.

I was wearing a nightgown.
How did I get into a nightgown?

My body felt clean, as
though I’d showered, even though I could not recall taking a shower
or getting into a fresh nightgown.

Something inside me felt
absolutely filthy. It was a sickening feeling.

The machine of my
photographic memory was not working. It felt as though I’d broken
down.

And I did indeed feel
broken – very, very broken.

My head hurt. My heart hurt
too. I felt sick to my stomach.

Through my bedchamber
window the sky was dark and overcast. Rain was pouring
down.

There was only one other
sound in the mansion. It seemed somewhat familiar, yet my mind felt
so muddled that the sound also seemed eerie and alien.

Before then, if I listened
to the sounds of the mansion, I could have heard movement for miles
around. But now I heard almost nothing at all. Nothing seemed to be
around the mansion for I don’t know how far – no mockingbirds
warbling, no foxes slinking, no beetles crawling. And nothing
seemed alive in the mansion either – no machines whirring, no Ms.
Crystobal cleaning, no Wyn pacing back and forth in the
library.

All I heard was the sound
of utter absence. It was as if a black hole had opened in the
sleepy village and swallowed the cosmic structure of my whole
world.

Yet through the abyss of
all that bleak nothingness I could effortlessly perceive the
absence of one particular – and particularly cherished – sound.
Theo. He was gone. I could not hear him at all. I stretched the
listening preceptors of my Blood Vivicanti power as far as I could,
perhaps all the way to Los Angeles. I could hear the happiness and
sorrows, the fighting and lovemaking, the passing and birthing of
countless lives – yet no Theo. The silence of his absence seemed so
deathly.

His scent was gone
too.

In fact there was only one
dominant scent in the mansion. I had never smelled it before and I
did not know what it was.

It smelled
awful.

Like an engine on its last
leg, my photographic memory sputtered to life. And I remembered
everything.

I had pierced Nell’s neck.
I had drunk her blood. Black blood. It had been blood so cold and
lifeless that her loneliness overwhelmed me. Her emptiness emptied
me of vitality. My whole being shut down.

How long had I been
asleep?

I knew only that it seemed
as though I’d slept for a day. Maybe two. Yet my body felt so tired
that it seemed as if I had not slept a wink.

Nell was like me in some
ways. The girl that I was before becoming a Blood Vivicanti had
been a child searching for love. The girl Nell that was still lived
in her Blood Memories like a cancer, growing deep within her bones,
devouring her from the inside out. Yet she was also a creature who
was so lonely, so bereft of love, that my own turmoil was the
sliver of a shadow in the dark corners of her existence.

The Dark Man, Lowen, lived
in her mind also, sneering at her, laughing at her, haunting her,
hating her, although he also selfishly loved how much she
selflessly loved him, and with the only love she could grasp, too.
Yes, Nell did indeed love Lowen, but it wasn’t with the love I felt
for Theo. No, she loved him as devotedly as an addict adoring the
rush of the drug – loving the rush while loathing the
dependence.

Lowen lived in Nell’s Blood
Memories. She depended on the sickness of his presence.

Now he lived in my mind
too. And I felt the threat of a similar sickening dependence. I
could see Lowen as though I were envisioning Theo. Yet it was a new
vision that lacked tenderness and kindness and hope for the future.
It was a vision of ambition and safety in controlling the lives of
others.

It was how I might have
turned out if Wyn hadn’t saved me.

The memory of Lowen and
Nell nauseated me.

Trauma was the harshest
teacher I’d ever had. But that was how I truly learned.

I never wanted to drink
blood again.

Where was Wyn? Where was
Theo? Where was the self-command that I had gained by drinking the
Blood Memories of healthier victims?

Theo’s absence seemed to
widen the hollow gap piercing my heart. I felt the urge to cling to
him because I could not get ahold of my
self
. I could not tell what was wrong
with me. I was not sure if I thought I needed more of his blood, or
if I just needed him.

Slowly, I got out of bed.
Slowly I got dressed.

My head was throbbing. My
heart was beating fast. I felt as though I might pass out at any
moment.

I left my room and I walked
along the hallway to the grand stairwell. I went down to the main
foyer.

Everything seemed so
normal. I had no clue that my world had been turned upside
down.

When I came down to the
foyer, I had planned to go to the library, and then perhaps down to
Wyn’s secret laboratory beneath his mansion. But the sight of the
mansion stopped me. It took a moment for my mind to accept what my
eyes saw.