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

Marcellus, Part 4 - Ta Gueule

On the evening he specified, Dasius told me he would come down to the house to put passports and itinerary in Laurent's hand, and walk Bell from the upstairs room to the black Mercedes that would be pulled up by the front walk. I wasn't sure it would happen. He insisted it would.

I worried about Bell. I didn't want him to like Laurent. I think Laurent knew that. Of course he knew that. I don't think he hated me for it, but it made that sort of feeling possible. He knew that if I could, we wouldn't ever see him again. But I was seventeen, and naive. I didn't really know anything about their relationship except for what I could see. I saw Laurent as an outsider, but I know now that of course to Bell he never was that. For Bell, for twenty years, Laurent had been the man in his life, and from his perspective their conflict had always been intimate. I saw the trip to Europe as coercion. He never said as much to me, but I came to understand that for Bell returning to Laurent's side was like going home. I couldn't understand then what he had gone through, and what Laurent meant to him. I was just mad.

I also was not interested in being treated like a dog that had shit on the floor. Which is how it felt to me when Laurent came through the door that evening and directed me to get lost. 

"This is where I live. Stick it up your ass," I said, holding my ground in my favorite cracked leather recliner. It had grown proper cold out, and it'd taken me a bit to get a good fire going in our little fireplace. 

"What did you say to me, bastard?" he hissed.

"Laurent, assez," Bell said, entering the room from the kitchen, palms out. Enough.

I turned my head away because I had embarrassed Bell, and he was already looking tired. I didn't think it was fair, for Laurent to look rested and made up, and for Bell to look like he'd been walking through hell. But I couldn't resist. "You're the bastard," I said, looking down at my lap.

"Tu doit retourner a la pute qui t'a accouche, salope!"  Go back to the whore who birthed you, bitch.

"Ca suffit, il a seulement dix-sept ans. Vous serez ruine l'ambiance," Bell urged, quietly. That's enough, he's only seventeen. You'll ruin the mood.

When I looked up Bell's eyes were soft, as always. "I'm sorry," I whispered.

"That's all right, little peach. If you need anything, I have left you the number to call. But I hear you are travelling to look at schools in the North. Isn't that exciting?" Bell said, trying to smile.

I looked away from his hand stroking Laurent's back, from L's face, his eyes shut. Did I have a deathwish? 

"Your Bell is talking to you," Laurent hissed, and I heard the sound of Bell thumping him gently. 

"Va te faire mettre." Go fuck yourself. I only had an ear for insults.

I am certain that if Bell wasn't there, I would have died then, because Laurent went deadly silent at those words. 

"Marcellus," Bell said in his sternest tone, after an excruciating minute of silence, "you will be punished when I get home. Do you understand?"

He was saving my life and I didn't know it. 

"Yes," I said, petulantly. I thought myself completely in the right. Even though Laurent had killed Miou, and I knew it, I had always thought myself better than Miou in youthful arrogance, and it didn't cross my mind that it could happen to me. I didn't know about Laurent's whip-crack temper, and the violence that could come from it.  I didn't know that vampires like him use violence to establish dominance, and that I had entered a challenge I no more knew about than could win. Vampires are creatures of blood and are not meant to live like wolves, pressed together where only one may snap at the necks of others. I didn't know that Laurent was that one. I would not know it until it was too late to back from the fight. At that age, I had everything to lose, and I had pushed Bell into defending me at a vulnerable time.