Darkness Comes (6 page)

“An…an Aradian?” She was even more confused and overwhelmed with what her father was telling her. She wasn’t sure where to start examining the information, what it meant for her and Toby. She had never even heard of these Aradians before but if they were so dangerous, why had her father never told her about them? “What the fuck is that?”

“They are a race of very powerful… beings descended from gods or aliens or something that need our kind,” Gus answered, not very helpfully. Gods or aliens? And Malorie thought the existence of vampires was fucked up. “They use our kind and discard us at whim and what you need to know is that you, Toby and I are most likely the last of our kind and the Aradians would be very eager to learn of our existence; of your existence.”

“Why?” she asked in breathless anticipation. “What are we?”

He laughed bitterly, his eyes shimmering with frustration and anger. “I don’t know; my father never explained that; he only told me to keep away from Aradians and so I have; for over four hundred and fifty years I have done as he told me.” She watched as he deliberated silently for a few moments, trying to get his emotions under control. It was apparent that there was much he was leaving out, but perhaps there was much he didn’t know. Finally, he took a deep breath, and met her eyes. “It had to have been an Aradian that bit you; it’s the only explanation that makes sense.”

“Thank God,” Mal’s mumbled words obviously surprising her father. He cocked his head to the side and looked at her until she sighed, feeling the color stain her cheeks as she admitted, “Thank God he wasn’t a vampire.”

“I don’t know if an Aradian bite is any better,” he scowled, his thoughts contorting his handsome face. “I should have told you, warned you, but I had never seen one, I didn’t understand. In truth, I figured they were more myth than reality until….”

He fell silent for a long time, letting his words play in Malorie’s head. She knew that he was thinking about the incident at the mall, about her getting bit. “Tell me what your father told you.”

“Our blood is very potent to an Aradian and because we replenish it so quickly, they can feast on us for long, long periods of time….

“I hate that bastard for not preparing me,” Gus spat out with some venom, ignoring the bewilderment coloring Mal’s face. “My father knew what the Aradians were, how they enslaved our kind for their own purposes, their own pleasure. He told me just enough to hate them but not enough to resist them. He was an angry and bitter man, Malorie; his perception of the Aradians are based on the fact that he had fallen in love with a woman and she gave birth to his child.”

“You,” Mal reiterated, her head spinning with all of this. No wonder why Gus didn’t look much older than she did; if he was nearly five hundred years old, there was some serious power in his blood, his genetics. Did she share the same long life expectancy? Was her grandfather still alive? There were so many questions and she had the feeling that her father didn’t know the answers to them any more than she did.

He nodded again. “Yes. He had hoped she would run away with him before she was chosen to be a… consort to one of the Aradians. But she laughed at him, telling him that it was her duty, her honor, to consort with their masters, that he was a fool to think otherwise. He was crushed, especially when the ceremony was performed and he had to… watch her with an Aradian….”

Mal gasped, knowing what her father was going to say. “No.”

“Yes,” he grimaced. “Father explained when one of our females was ready she would be given to an Aradian male during a festival of sorts. The female would be cleansed and pampered before being laid upon an alter where the chosen Aradian would lie with her, taking her and using her body and drinking her blood throughout the night in front of the entire village. She would bear his mark until he had his fill and then she’d be given to a different Aradian. If she survived.

“They hosted many other festivals throughout the year as well,” Gus continued, lost in the story and oblivious to Mal’s difficulty in grasping everything he was telling her. “Our men were forced to fuck as many women – human women – as they could, in the hopes of producing more of our kind.

“Father spoke of women being brought in by the dozens since many children were born but only a few had our… unique abilities. And females, the most highly desired by the Aradians, were even more rare; only a handful over many, many years. Several Aradians would be at the festivals, arousing our men and women into states of sexual frenzy, until it devolved into a gluttony of carnal excess,” Gus recited from memory, almost by rote, as if he had heard the stories many times and the words didn’t have any meaning. Until now. “Our people had no choice.”

“I don’t think it was too much of a chore for them,” Malorie admitted softly, her fingers grazing the bandage on her neck. Forcing herself to meet her father’s eyes, she continued, “When the… Aradian took me in his arms I had no resistance and I have trained my entire life to destroy vampires; I would have given up anything to remain in his arms.”

Grief twisted his features as he looked at her, but before he could say anything that might condemn her for a fool, she shook her head, “Finish the story; how did he escape?”

“He managed to get out during one of these orgies,” Gus managed. “He took his son; he took me, and turned his back on his privileged life as an Aradian slave. Father had been grateful that I had been a son and not a daughter; had I been a girl, they never would have let me go.”

Mal’s brows pulled together, trying desperately to make sense of her father’s tale. “But then how did he know the village had been destroyed if he escaped before it happened?”

Gus huffed out a harsh laugh. “It was too difficult to make it on his own and he returned a few months later. Only, there was nothing left but the dead bodies of the men and women slaughtered by the vamps. It had been only a few hours after the massacre and he found the woman he loved – my mother – with her belly cut open and a child removed. He never knew whether the child lived or died, or who the father was; if he had been the father. ”

“Oh, God,” Mal groaned, picturing the scene in her head; seeing the black-haired Aradian in the middle of it, his shirt soaked in blood as he held a small, newly born baby to his chest, his piercing cry alerting the world to his presence. She could smell the stench of burning flesh and blood and she almost gagged. But was this a memory of what had happened or was it only in her head?

“My father went into hiding, managing to make his way aboard a ship heading for the New World,” Gus said, still oblivious to the anxiety nibbling at the edges of Malorie’s thoughts. “He taught me everything he knew and trained me to be a warrior, just as I’ve taught you.”

He laughed coldly, “We were safe in the New World for a very long time and while it was sometimes very difficult, it was almost peaceful. Your grandfather and I were farmers, of all things. Much like you and Toby, we had a knack for growing things and found a measure of contentment even as we moved further and further west.

“But when the Aradians started arriving in the eighteen hundreds, my father became paranoid, telling me that it was imperative that I never have children, that it wouldn’t be fair to them should they ever be caught. He made me promise that no matter what happened to him I was to never have children and for several years after he left I kept my promise.

“But then I met your mother and fell in love,” Gus exhaled slowly, a sad smile playing on his lips as he looked at Malorie, the tension leaving his face for a brief moment. “Your birth was the happiest day of my long, long life.”

Closing her eyes, afraid of the answer, she asked, “What happened to my mother?”

“It’s hard for me to talk about her….” He straightened his spine and clenched his jaw. She knew it was a touchy subject and she never questioned him, even when she was desperate for a mother’s advice, but now….

“You don’t talk about her at all,” she interrupted, forcing him to look at her.

“I know,” he nodded and pain filled his eyes. Then the fight simply went out of him as his shoulders slumped and he covered his face with his hands. With his face twisted with anguish and remembrance, he said painfully, “I loved her very much, Malorie, and I think, I mean I know, she loved me but she didn’t understand; she never understood.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, her head still filled with fluff.

“She knew only a little about me, about my fight against vampires,” he answered softly after a long pause. “Somehow she discovered that I had lived a long, long time and she… decided that she wanted to live forever as well, to be with me forever, and she found a vamp to convert her.”

“Oh, dear Lord.” Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest at her father’s confession; no wonder why he didn’t talk about the woman, why he was so protective.

“You were still so young, only a few weeks old,” her father continued, almost as if once he started talking about it, he couldn’t stop. “When she returned to the house, I knew what she was but I couldn’t kill her; I loved her. I couldn’t kill her.”

After a long, grief-filled silence, he continued, “We managed to escape but I didn’t know anything about raising a baby, I only knew I had to keep you safe, from her and Aradians.”

“What about you and Toby?” Her eyes were drifting close again. Despite the earth shattering story her father had just told her, her head was already full up; she didn’t know how much more she could learn and not scream. “Aren’t you in danger as well?”

“Perhaps, but you are a female,” His voice was fiercely protective. “The most sought after, the most desirable, commodity to the Aradians; I don’t know what would happen to you if they capture you.”

Softly, not sure if she wanted to know the answer, if she knew which answer she most wanted to hear, she asked, “Can they die?”

Gus was silent a long moment and Malorie cracked open an eye to look at him. She hadn’t even realized her eyes had closed until she saw the grim expression on her father’s face. “I don’t know, Malorie; I just don’t know.”

“You should have told me this sooner,” her words slurred slightly and she yawned. She couldn’t stop the feelings of… betrayal that her father had kept so much from her for so long. Had the Aradian not bitten her, would he have ever told her? Would he have kept her blissfully in the dark, unprepared for the danger? Perhaps he wasn’t even fully aware of the danger himself, having been kept from the Aradians as well.

“I know.” he ruffled her hair, just like he used to do when she was a child, bringing a sad smile to her lips. “I wish things could have been different; I wish…” he trailed off as he swallowed the rest of his regrets. As he reached her door, he paused, “Get some sleep.”

And then he was gone, leaving Malorie to go back to sleep. Reaching out, she turned off the lamp and plunged the room into darkness, trying to absorb and understand all that her father had told her as her brain shut down for the night.

*****

A scraggly, fifteen year old Malorie, wearing clothes that were too big for her and carrying a well-used sword, systematically made her way through the latest vampire massacre. The small town had been decimated by the vampire hordes and it was her job to go through all of the houses and see if there were any survivors. In her life, she had seen plenty of carnage but nothing could compare to the… pointlessness of this latest attack. It was almost as if the vampires were just toying with the Blade Soldiers, taunting them with the knowledge that there was nothing they could do to stop the destruction.

Anger burned in Malorie’s chest because she knew that the monsters were right; there were so few willing and able to take on a single vampire, let alone an entire pack of them. But she kept fighting because that was what she was trained to do; what was the alternative? Death? Not bloody likely; not while she still had breath in her body.

There was an eerie silence hovering over the gutted town as she made her way through the empty houses, ignoring the bodies that were abandoned, those both drained and those just killed. She wondered how many people had actually lived in the town; the sign said “Population: 102,” now it was zero. Poor bastards. Kicking a limb out of her way, she trudged through the broken door frame of the last house on the short street.

A light flickered overhead as she made her way through the entry way. She ducked her head to avoid hitting it on the collapsed ceiling, looking around cautiously in case there were any vampires lingering. There had been one hell of a battle in this place; the furniture had been trashed and there were holes in the walls. As she passed beneath the hole in the ceiling, she looked up and could see the night sky; it must have been one hell of an explosion; burn marks scorched the edges and she gave an appreciative smile. Hopefully, that had taken out a couple vamps.

Coming around a corner, she froze as she saw him, a boy on the cusp of manhood standing over the dusty remains of two vamps, the sword still in his hands. His eyes were wild and grief stricken and a little crazed as he looked up and saw her standing there gaping at him. With a guttural cry, he rushed towards her, raising the sword in his hands, ready to take her out, too.

With natural grace and years of training, she spun out of his path, grabbing his arm and using his momentum to slam him against the wall behind her. Plaster drifted down from the crumbling ceiling as she pressed her body against his back and hissed in his ear, “I’m not a vampire, you fucking moron.”