The Story of the Vampire, L (Completed | Featured )

Part 8 - Complete Bliss

I remember very well the feeling of Laurent's hands fluttering, touching my face, whispering, "You have to stop screaming. Dasius, people will hear, people will come. Don't you remember what happened in Paris when you were a young man? Please, please," begging me to be quiet. 

I took in a breath so as to scream again, pressed against the hardwood floor beneath him. He covered me with his body, as if he could subsume me, make me a part of him.

"Dasius, they came and took your brother, the people. If you don't stop screaming, stop screaming, people will come and take you from me. People will hear, Dasius. I won't be able to protect you, please," touching me, speaking of the time in 1501 when an angry mob had broken down our door in Paris, the indelicacy of Nicky's madness, which had laid a trail straight to our door, of retrieving my brother in a sorry state, and fleeing to the countryside. 

"It's not me you want," I sobbed, turning beneath him, pushing him away by the chin when he leaned toward my face. "It's not me you worry about."

"Why do you pretend that I don't love you?" he demanded, holding onto my protesting wrist. His hair was wild around his head, leonine curls pulled by a lover.

"I'm going," I told him. "You killed my brother. Everything is clear now. You've killed us all. We are all corpses. We are all dead. We are still dying. You won't have me. It's too late. You've killed the boy I loved. I am born again. I am new. I am born again. I am new," repeating it and repeating it.

"You won't go," he whispered. "Where will you go?"

"I want to go home."

He tried to put me to bed. We struggled. But he did not say much. Privately, he had been having this disagreement with me for months. He had already said what he meant to say. I buttoned my shirt, and he unbuttoned it. I put on my coat and he slipped it off me, threw it away. I tried to slap him and he grabbed my wrists, and when I went to scream again, he pushed me to the floor in my room, said, "You think I don't know how to undress a man? If you will go, take nothing I have given you," shouting at me, "Go to your Mother, to nature, naked," and when I tried to bite him, he headbutted me in the jaw, and I found that his forehead was very hard. 

He had said to me before, about that time, whenever he brought it up, laughing, "Am I laughing about it now? I am not laughing at you, Dasius, it is just that I am still a little hysterical from that time."

I was not able to see that he was hysterical. All that I could understand was that I wanted to go and he could not stop tearing at me with his hands, grabbing onto an arm, a hemline, my hair. He chased me into the scullery, where of course there was nothing sharp because I had removed any knives long ago. I had forgotten it, happily deluded, that in those long years of near penury, he had often tried to cut himself, or achieved it. I looked for a knife to threaten him with, though I knew there were none. He knew what I was after, and when I turned around from my searching, there he was, like a thin blond corpse, with his sword. There were blooming on his chin, his neck, his collarbones, his arms, bruises in the shape of my hands, and I tilted up my face against the creeping of shame. A wild wind blew in me, twisting my fingers into ready claws, my breath quivering like a reed.

"What?" I choked, throat tight from his palm briefly lighting there in our struggle. "Is this the end?"

But he was not speaking, head low on his neck, sword in one hand, as if it were a short knife he might stab me with. 

I took in a long breath, ready to talk to him about Jean Aureil, to say that he would have my head off, like he'd had my master's. Carve the flesh of this beast, I wanted to tell him, as though I were the devil in Holofernes, but he spoke before I could, his voice very soft and shaking as if cold.