The Vampires of Soldiers Cove (10 page)

As
I leaned forward clutching a white towel to my chest she dressed the wound. “It shouldn’t take too long for her to heal,” she said to Gavin. “If she wills herself to sleep, maybe a few hours.”

That sounded like a great idea even if just to escape the pain.
“You hear that Rachel?” Gavin asked me. “Do you understand? You have to make yourself sleep once she’s finished. You’ll heal very fast if you do.” I wanted to tell him that I was bleeding not deaf and I had heard her for myself, but speaking would have put me in more pain than I was willing to be in at the moment so I just nodded at him indicating I understood.

Gavin looked confused and worried.
He leaned down and brushed my hair out of my face, stroking it while the dressing was being done. It seemed to drag on forever.

Finally she was finished and they gently laid me down on my stomach.
The blanket was pulled up to my waist but no further as not to irritate the dressing. For the first time since I’d been made vampire I felt cold. I wished the blanket could go up all the way but hopefully I’d be sleeping soon and it wouldn’t matter.

“Sleep now,” Gavin said as he continued to sit by me and stroke my hair making sure it was off to the side and not touching my back.
“When you wake you’ll be almost completely healed. I’ll be here,” he said.

Closing
my eyes I focused on sleep. It took longer than normal as I kept getting distracted by the pain, but soon enough I was pulled under. I felt my shoulder contract in my dreams as it healed. The process in and of itself was painful. I could feel the muscles, tendons, and skin being pulled back together and reforming at an alarming rate. Something that would have been impossible during my human life was happening in mere hours. I dreamed about the revenant, its glowing eyes, its peeling skin, and the jagged and yellow fangs. The creature was definitely human at one time which was truly disturbing to me. What had happened to this person to be dealt such a cruel fate? To be turned into a true monster with no emotions, only relentless suffering and blood hunger.

In my dreams I saw my own face in the mirror slowly turning from human, to vampire, to
revenant. So much pain, it must have been too much for my mind to handle because it was then that I woke up.

I awakened to the sound of two voices talking from across the room.
  Opening my eyes I saw Gavin and James staring daggers at each other. I closed my eyes again pretending to still be asleep. It sounded like they were arguing and I had healed just enough to be nosy and find out why.

“Things are more serious now
. We can’t be wasting time with you playing guardian to a new vampire. We should be training to fight and kill these things.” James was almost yelling.

“It was only one
revenant and as bad as that is we don’t know for a fact that there are more,” Gavin argued. “You’re acting as if we had a horde of them here.  And besides she knew it was there before we even saw it. If she hadn’t been there I’m not sure I could have killed it.”

“If she hadn’t been there you wouldn’t have been in the courtyard in the first place,”
he shot back. “How did it get on the grounds anyway? Have you thought about that? Maybe the reason your little student sensed it is because she’s the one that put it there.”

I didn’t like the way James said ‘student’.
He made it sound almost dirty. “Listen to yourself. That’s ridiculous, up until today she had never even seen one, let alone create and control one enough to sneak it into the sanctuary.”

“You want her for your mate don’t you?” James said as if he considered the idea of that repulsive.
Gavin was silent. “You disgust me.  Keep her as your whore if you must but anything beyond that is unforgiveable. She is inferior to you and to our family. Her creation was an insult to our entire clan. There’s a reason we haven’t had one of
them
in our ranks for over three hundred years.”

“You would rather hold on to your narrow minded ideals than find a way to deal with what Samuel is bringing down upon us?
You have a lot of arrogance brother,” Gavin said.  Now James was silent.

“Get out of here,” Gavin told him.
“I don’t want to argue this with you while more important things are happening.”

“Fine,
take care of your whore, but when this is all over and we’ve finished with her I’m going to petition the council to end her. I
will
see that this whole thing is set right again, I promise.”

“Get out!” Gavin said making a low pitched growling noise.
  My mind was reeling. Would they really decide to execute me once I had served some kind of purpose? I didn’t know much about the politics of this inner world I had so recently become part of but surely I thought they wouldn’t end my existence over nothing more than burying an unpleasant piece of history.

I heard the door close behind James as he exited the room and decided to sit up.
“You heard all of that didn’t you?”

“Yes.”
I was shaking with anger and fear. “Can he really do that? Would they kill me just on his suggestion?”

Gavin quickly moved to my side and took my face in his hands. “It won’t come to that,” he said.

“Oh my god.  He hates me that much?” I said knowing it was a question I already had the answer to. I had heard it in their conversation.

“You’ll be useful and will prove yourself to be a good and loyal servant to Angus.
Do that and you won’t be in any danger. I won’t let that happen.” The portion of the conversation about taking me as a mate filtered through my mind but somehow this didn’t seem like the time or place for that question.

“Sleep again,” he said laying me down.
He positioned himself next to me on the bed and ran his hands up and down my back. “When you wake the next time you should be healed.”

Sleeping was the last thing I wanted to do but I decided listening to Gavin would be my best bet if I was going to stay alive.
I no longer felt cold at least and so I lay uncovered, closed my eyes and drifted down, this time into a dreamless sleep.

I woke some time later alone in the room.
There was a white shirt waiting for me on a chair next to the bed and I grabbed it on my way to the bathroom.  Studying the reflection of my shoulder in the mirror I was taken aback.  As promised I was fully healed. Just a short time ago my shoulder had been torn off, now after just a few hours of rest it had grown back and completely closed up, not even a scar remained. I guess that was one reason to be grateful to be a vampire, although if I had not been made vampire I wouldn’t have been in this predicament in the first place.

I
threw the shirt on and was making my way back to the bed when I heard a knock at the door.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Holly,” a soft feminine voice said, “I came to look at your shoulder.” I opened the door slightly to see the same young blonde who had treated me earlier. Deciding she was safe I let her in, although in the back of my mind now I wondered which of these people might want to kill me and which might not. Now that I knew what James was planning it didn’t hurt to be extra careful.

“Hi,” she said bouncing in
. “You’re looking a lot better than when I saw you last.”

“For sure,” I agreed.

“Let me see your wound.” I sat on the chair and pulled my shirt up for her examination. She ran her fingers over what had once been a bleeding hole in my body. “Excellent,” she exclaimed, “you’re all healed up.” Holly took another chair and sat down with me. She was looking me up and down like she was judging me in some way. “And I finally get to meet the vamp who is stealing my little brother’s heart.”

The words didn’t match the picture.
If she was Gavin’s older sister she must have been made vampire while she was still very young. “So Gavin is your brother?” I said trying to sound casual.

“Oh yes.
You know he’s never had a proper mate. We are hoping he will find someone suitable soon.” She winked at me as if to say ‘and maybe that will be you’. “He’s been smitten with you for quite some time now.”

I
sat in confusion at her statement. How could that be? We had only just met. “And when he meets someone he can move out of the sanctuary and join the living. Have a regular kind of life. He never really had a chance to do that before he was turned due to the circumstances. My mate and I are about to buy a house, moving out among the people again. It’s been a long time since we did that. I’m looking forward to living on the outside again. The sanctuary gets old after about fifty years or so.”

“What do you mean he’s been smitten with me for quite some time?” I asked echoing her statement.

“Oh shit. I forget that you’re new and don’t know about these things,” she said seeming to kick herself mentally for mentioning it. “I don’t suppose he’s told you the story, I mean how could he?”

Just then we were interrupted by another knock.
Damn it
I thought. Now I wasn’t going to get anything out of her. Life these days seemed to be more questions than answers. Gavin didn’t wait for an answer before peeking his head through the door.

“I just wanted to see if you were awake yet,” he smiled at me.
“Hey,” he said greeting his sister with a warm embrace. Unlike his interactions with James he seemed to have a free and easy relationship with Holly.

“Just checking on our patient.
She’s completely healed and you are fine to go ahead with your plans,” she said giving him a smile.

“Thanks,” he said with a tad of embarrassment in his voice.

Holly turned back toward me. 
“We will have to chat more later, when you’re not so pressed for time.”

“I look forward to it,” I smiled.
And with that Holly exited leaving us alone.

“So you’re feeling better?”

“Yes feeling better but more confused than ever,” I confessed. “Firstly, what the hell was that thing that attacked us? You said it was called a…?”

“Revenant,” he said finishing my sentence.

“And what, pray tell, is that?” He drew a deep breath and took a moment searching for the right words to help me comprehend.

“A
revenant is a creature, no a person, who’s been made into one.” His explanation wasn’t coming together. He decided to start over. “On the night you became one of us I drained your blood, your
living
blood. Then I replaced it with my own. I brought you just to the edge of death and moments before you were about die I cut open my wrist and made sure you ingested my blood. After a few moments you woke up and drank on your own. In that process you take in enough good vampire blood to replace your living human blood. Do you understand?”

“I think so, but I don’t remember any of that,” I said.
“The last thing I remember is you biting me and then I woke up the next night in my house.”

“No you wouldn’t remember, and you were out for three days actually. During the drinking of my blood your heart and brain shut down, and then you are reborn so to speak. And then becoming a full blooded vampire happens over time. Your body can’t do it all at once.”

“I see,” I said getting a clearer picture of how transformation works.
“But what does that have to do with that thing?” I asked.

“A
revenant is someone who underwent the same transformation you did; the only difference is that they were dead already. You can’t create a real vampire from the already dead. You need a still beating heart and living blood. After you’ve been dead for a while the vampire blood will reanimate you but with different consequences.”

“So they’re like a vampire zombie?”

Gavin laughed.  He had a kind of goofy, but endearing, laugh that made you feel happy just on hearing it.  “I guess you could put it that way.”

“I see.
And why would somebody do that?”

“A number of reasons, the first being grief.
You lose somebody and can’t stand it, you try to bring them over but it’s too late and you create a revenant accidentally.”

“You think one of us did that by accident?”

“No, the other reason vampires have created them in the past is because they were power hungry. Revenant’s have no free will or thoughts of their own. They are very hard to control but if you can control them they would make a powerful and unquestioning servant.”

“Oh my god,” I said
as my nightmares came flooding back. “I’ve dreamed about them.”

“Well after today who wouldn’t?”

“No, I mean before that. I dreamed last night of these things ripping me open and literally eating me alive.”

“That’s how they feed,” Gavin said with a surprised look on his face since he had not provided me with that tidbit of information.

“They were with a young vampire who seemed to be controlling them.”

“Samuel,” he said putting two and two together.
“Maybe James was right.”

“Do you have a picture of him?”