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

Ch 13 pt 1 - Nataniellus, 1960 (The Scissors of Fate)

"Come here, devil, come here, devil," I said, wiggling my little finger at Leechtin, at Faya. 

"What does he want?" he asked nobody, standing by himself in the tulips, pale in the daylight. 

"Your hair is all come out," I said, gesturing for him to come.

He moved towards me haphazardly, not interested in being touched and darting his eyes everywhere he found interest. 

"Here it is, we'll put your hair right."

"It's not good, Nataniellus, I don't care about my hair."

"I don't know what you mean by 'it'. Me?"

"Today."

"Oh you've no notion of what day it is," I said, and took hold of him. Everything about him was struggling with me, without struggling. He leaned ever so slightly away. 

"You don't know how to pin it," he said, quietly, while I pinned  his hair. "He doesn't know how. When he fixes things he is making them worse."

"You mean old snake."

"Why?" he asked, again to the air, speaking to himself. "There are two legs and no tail."

"You've a tail, devil. I've seen it."

"What is he talking about? Why is he bothering us? Today is terrible."

"Why are you avoiding talking to me? Have you got a secret?"

"He's onto us. What will we do?"

"Where did you go after Rome?" I asked him, holding him around the waist in the sunlight. He was wearing a soft green silk belted with gold, his neck bare.

"Hercynian. Many years. I spent there many years."

"There's 'I'. So what is your big secret?"

"Bit him a long time ago, I did. I bit him. Can't take it back. I killed them. What should I do? Did those things. Too late now. What can I do?" he asked.

"Stop talking nonsense."

"No," he said, seeming thoughtful. "Not nonsense. Why does he never understand me?"

I traced the curve of his cheekbone with the tip of my finger, and his wandering eyes met mine.

"Are you very mad at me?" he asked me, quietly.

"I don't know how many times that I have to tell you I'm not." My fingertip reached the soft place at the ridge of the ear, and stroked him, and he closed his eyes, parted his lips, which had been so ruby red when I had first known him. The color had faded as his confused mind had come on, paler and without the blood he needed to sustain him. Perhaps his poor starved brain is pale as well.

When first I had come back he had grabbed me by the wrists and said, lucidly, like the man I knew, shouted at me, "Now don't go, it will be the end of me! Listen!" It had shocked me to be touched in any way, and the moreso fiercely. The touch itself brought me to tears, to be squeezed at the wrists. "You left me," I had pleaded with him, if only so he would let me go. "Oh you don't understand," he'd said, throwing my hands down, making his "huh?" noise. "You don't understand. Then why did you come?" Well I hadn't understood.

He made a sound as I touched him, curving my finger around his ear, of sad solitude, of being uncertain that I was really there or if he was only having a lonely, longing dream. 

"It's me, Faya. I'm here, now. You're safe, now."

He remained quiet, stroked by me. 

"Myself and the children, your Iovita, Aulus, Cassius, and Nonus. We left the city for Misenum a few months after you'd gone. Without you, the creditors descended, and we could not sustain the house. There were debts, and threats.They wanted to break up the estate and its holdings, but there was no record of us, so they could not sell us. Did you do that? I walked to Misenum with Nonus on my back, you know he has always been a little weak."