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

Part 7 - Help Me

That evening, after we had finished all of our work and cleaned up after our dinner, I suggested that we go out and sit on the cliffside, so that we could watch the full moon rise together. I thought, it being early fall, that we might also be able to see the last of the fireflies in our orchard. I was not so sentimental as to think we would have a special memory over things like that, but it is the case that most of my memories are of quiet, beautiful moments together. 

After lunch, Escha had abandoned us unceremoniously to go sit in the peristyle garden by himself, so he wasn't with us. I had Nonus on my lap pretending to be a goat, while Aulus and Cassius practiced counting back from one hundred by sevens, eights, and nines. I know that by then I already thought of us as a little family, in spite of myself. I think that one of the reasons I drank too much, before I promised my master not to, was because I could not bear the thought of losing them all even if I myself faced a life of comfort. I did not have words for what I felt, or the ability to express them, and to try to do so would not be a good thing. 

That's all I know to say even now, so I said nothing, sitting with them, and tried not to think of the unwatered wine I always thought of in quiet moments.  "Belo, belo," Nonus said to me, imitating a nervous goat, "Belllllo." I kissed him between the eyes, and he imitated the sound of my kiss happily with his eyes shut. The dark made our chatter quiet, and the air all but swallowed it, as the moon rose over the sea, too big to hold in the hand. 

"What if a wolf comes?" Nonus the goat asked me, quietly. 

"I will hit him with my stick," I told him. 

"Yeah," he said. "What about a wild boar?"

"I will ride him away with both my hands in the air."

"Yeah, that's good. Me, too. I will ride a boar without touching him."

"Let me see your hands."

The week previous, Vivacio had ordered Nonus to cut him a switch for relying on Aulus too much. This evening, while scrubbing the empty triclinium pool, the wounds across his palms had opened again. I had noticed the blood dripping from his fingertip, and scolded him for not alerting me. He rubbed his eyes sleepily and opened his hands for me.

"When we get back to the house I'm going to wrap them up for you."

"I don't want to be a burden," he said, tucking his head under my chin, though I knew he really feared the pain.

"You're not a burden, little brother. If your hands fester, who will take care of me when I'm old?"

He pointed at himself silently, touched his own soft cheek with his fingertip. He nodded.

"You don't have to listen to everything Vivacio says. He's not the master."

"But he is right that I rely on Aulus. Aulus tells me so. I have to answer for myself if he asks me questions."

"You do all right," I said. "How can you know what to say when he makes you so nervous?"

"Aulus says I'll be nervous my whole life, and so I should learn how to speak up even so. I guess," Nonus said, sounding certain.

"What would you do if you were me, little one, and thought that someone was stealing from our house?" I asked him.

"Is it real?" he asked, his feline eyes narrowing. He looked like a little animal. "Is it true?"

"Say it is. What do you do?"

He thought about it and then said, with confidence, "I would find the thief and I would kill him. I would kill him until he is dead, and then I would spit on his body."