The Blood is Love by Karina Halle

8

Absolon

I wakeup to dog breath. A wet tongue licking my face.

I open my eyes, blink, seeing Odin in front of me, his dark eyes searching mine, asking if I’m okay, telling me that he was worried, that he managed to learn how to open doors and I should be proud of him.

I stare at him for a moment, trying to get my bearings, that I’m lying on the floor, absently noticing the open door before I get a look at the rest of the bedroom.

It’s destroyed.

The bed is crooked, the frame broken, the headboard ripped in two.

The mattress has slid onto the floor.

Covered in blood.

No.

No.

I get to my knees, my feet, stagger forward, lean against the slanted bedpost, the only thing keeping me up as I stare down at the sight.

There is blood everywhere.

The room hums with it.

Fresh blood, soaked into the pillow, the sheets, the mattress, the rug. I don’t even have to breathe deep to know whose blood that is.

Lenore’s.

“No,” I croak, falling to my knees, running my hands over it, still feeling damp. There’s so much blood, too much blood.

What have I done?

What have I done to her?

I feel the circuitry of my brain start snapping, wires being cut, everything going loose. My head goes back and I scream at the top of my lungs. A long, deafening, guttural scream that rips from my gut, shreds through my throat, fills the room until all the glass cracks, a symphony of explosions, from the artwork on the walls, to the mirrors in the bathroom, to the glass jar that holds her toothbrush. It all shatters like fireworks, glass raining down.

The memory comes back, all at once. I was fucking her, she was coming…she told me she loved me. Tears in her eyes. I felt all her emotions as if they were stemming from somewhere inside me, my old and weary heart expanding until it was close to bursting, and then I knew I wasn’t in control.

That I was never in control.

The moment I brought Lenore into my house, I knew I had lost it all, all those centuries of carefully guarded, meticulously parceled control gone in an instant when she fixed her eyes on me. I had watched her grow up, intrigued, curious, wondering who she would become. But it was nothing like what I felt once she was in my life. No longer someone I watched at a distance. And so I had to keep her at a distance, in every single way that I could, because the loss of all that control that kept me sane and alive meant that I would no longer be the vampire that I was.

The beast took advantage last night.

My emotions were running too high, out of the locked box, fueled by my love for her, the very love I knew would try to destroy her. The love I’ve been fighting against from the start.

I knew what was happening, felt the change from deep inside, that build-up of darkness and anger and hunger that I’ve done everything to make sure stays buried.

It was escaping.

I told Lenore to run.

But she didn’t.

She’s too stubborn, or maybe she loves me too much, or maybe those two things are both connected, but either way she didn’t run.

She stayed with the beast.

She thought she could tame it.

She thought she could love it.

But the beast doesn’t love her.

Instead, it’s driven wild by her love.

Driven mad.

I slipped away into the black, into the background, but there was just enough of me to make sure I didn’t hurt her. I should have had enough control to stop fucking her like I was, tail and all, but I couldn’t. Part of me wondered how far she would let it go, part of me wondered how far I would let it go. I wanted her like nothing else, even in my most vile form. I wanted to fuck her like the animal I was, make her feel pleasure she never thought was possible.

I’m not sure I achieved that.

My memory starts to sputter.

Then it goes blank.

No, it turns red.

Like the blood that’s everywhere.

The blood of my lover.

Everything inside me breaks.

I open my mouth and roar again, the sound shaking my bones, shaking the room, and then I smell Amethyst and I hear her behind me.

“Solon?” And then “Oh my god, what happened?”

I shake my head, unable to focus, to speak.

The blood, so much blood.

Did I kill her?

Where is she?

“Solon,” Amethyst says again, and I feel her hand on my shoulder. “Why are you naked? Where is Lenore? My god, there’s so much blood…”

I can only stare at it.

If I killed her…

If I hurt her…

“Come on, get up,” Amethyst says to me, reaching under my arm, trying to pull me to my feet, but I’m deadweight.

“What the fuck happened?” Wolf’s voice booms, and then he’s in the room and grabbing me, hauling me up with ease. But I can’t stop staring at the blood, while every structure inside of me is slowly crumbling, cracks in the foundation of everything I’ve tried to be.

“Solon?” he says, holding me by the shoulders and peering at me. “What happened?”

“You need clothes,” Amethyst says, and she disappears into the bathroom. “Don’t you have a robe?”

I nod absently while Wolf digs his nails in my skin to get my attention. I slowly bring my gaze to meet his, the horror dulling my senses. “Solon. Tell me what happened. Whose blood is that? Where is Lenore?”

I swallow. It feels like a brick in my throat. “I don’t know. I woke up and I saw this. I don’t…” I close my eyes, trying to breathe in deeply.

“I couldn’t find your robe,” I hear Amethyst say, though I know it’s in the bathroom. “Pants. You need pants of some kind. I’m going to find you pants.”

I hear the rustling of drawers and it all sounds far away and I wonder if perhaps none of this is real. Maybe it’s a nightmare. Maybe I’m hallucinating.

“You transformed,” Wolf says. He lets out a long exhale and I can practically hear his disappointment. “You don’t remember.”

I nod. My lips feel like sandpaper. “I told Lenore to run. She didn’t. Then I don’t know. Wolf,” I eye him, “there’s too much blood.”

His brows furrow as he looks over the massacre.

“She can heal, right?” Amethyst says, coming over with a pair of black silk pajama pants and shoving them into my hands. Her smile is stiff, her voice full of false hope she’s putting on for show, because she doesn’t want to believe the alternative.

I glance at Wolf for a moment before looking back at her. “We don’t know what can kill Lenore and what can’t. That’s…that’s a lot of blood. That’s too much blood, even for a vampire to lose.”

“Then where did she go?” Amethyst says. “Why not yell for help?”

“You can’t yell with your throat ripped out,” I tell her. “I might have shredded her to pieces.”

She flinches at the bluntness of my words, but I feel the need to be blunt. I am a monster, through and through. I did this to her friend, I did this to my love.

“She’s right though,” Wolf says, walking around the bed, running his fingers over the blood and smelling them. “If the wound was fatal, Lenore’s body would be here. It’s not. She’s gone. She didn’t come through the house, I would have smelled her. There would be a trail. So then, how did she leave the room?”

We all look to the open window.

Wolf walks over to it, pulling back the curtains further, examining the edge. “No signs of damage. But you don’t normally sleep with your windows open, do you?”

“Not usually,” I tell him. “But Lenore, she likes the air, she…” I trail off, my heart in a vice, the image of us squabbling before bed because she wants a cool breeze and I want the room as shuttered and dark and secure as possible. I swallow. “They could have been open, I don’t remember.”

Wolf shakes his head while Amethyst gestures to my pajamas again. “You need to stop being naked, Solon.”

“Humans,” I mutter, glaring at her while I slip my pants on.

She gives me a look right back.

One that says monster.

“I think she went out through the window,” Wolf says, peering outside. “I smell her blood here, though I don’t see it. And there’s something else. Brimstone.”

“Brimstone?” Amethyst repeats. “That’s an actual smell?”

“It is,” Wolf muses, eyes darting around the window.

Now I can smell it. “Sulfur,” I explain to Amethyst. “It’s sulfur.”

“Witches,” Wolf says. “Her parents?”

“Fuck, I hope so,” I say. Sulfur is often associated with magic, though her parents have never smelled like sulfur. Different herbs maybe, nothing entirely unpleasant. I’ve also never known them to have the ability to fly, or at least scale a house of this height, but magic is often surprising.

I head over to the wardrobe and pull out a t-shirt, slipping it on, then I create flames in the middle of the bedroom.

“Where are you going?” Wolf asks.

“To see her parents,” I tell him. “They might have her.”

Please let them have her. Please let her be alive.

I step into the Black Sunshine, quickly sealing it up behind me, then waste no time in leaving the house, running through the empty city in this gray dead world. Occasionally I see a shadow soul lurking in the distance, but I know they’re attracted to me because of my despair, so I keep running until I’m standing outside the house on Lily Street.

I’d like to just appear inside their apartment, but ambushing two vampire slayers, who may or may not be on edge, would probably result in my death. And while I have no doubt I probably deserve such a death, I won’t welcome it until I know what happened to Lenore.

I look around me and then step up on the front stoop, at least partially sheltered from the street, and after I’m confident there are no prying eyes or passing humans milling about, I create a flaming door in the gray, stepping out into the real world again.

I place my ear against the door to Lenore’s apartment, listening for signs of her, but there’s nothing. I don’t smell her either. Suddenly my hopes are fading.

Then I do the same to her parents door right beside hers, leading to their apartment above. I can hear faint murmurs, both Elaine and Jim talking to each other. I ring their doorbell, realizing I should have brought my phone. Perhaps texting them from the house would have been smart, but it felt like this was quicker.

In moments, the door opens.

It’s Elaine, staring at me in surprise.

“Absolon,” she says, then her adrenaline spikes. “Where is Lenore?”

Fuck.

“She’s not here?” I ask, unable to keep the panic out of my voice.

She shakes her head, looking over me in fear. “No. No, I haven’t spoken to her today.”

“Can I come in?” I ask.

She hesitates. It’s not wise to invite a vampire inside your house, but I know she has the slayer’s blade somewhere on her body, probably strapped to her leg beneath her cargo pants. If she does, it’s absolutely going wild with me standing so close to her. Every passing second the blade is telling her it needs to be driven straight into my heart.

Patience, I tell the blade. Let’s see what horrors I’ve done first.

“Yes, of course,” Elaine says, snapping out of it, and I wonder if she heard my thoughts. She opens the door wider and I step inside. She looks me up and down, eyeing my pajama pants and t-shirt. And I’m barefoot. I hear her heartbeat accelerate. “What happened? Where did you come from?”

“Solon,” Jim says, and I look up to see him at the top of the stairs. “Why don’t you come up here and we can put on some coffee. You do drink coffee?”

We don’t have any blood, is what the rest of his brain is saying.

I nod and I go up the stairs, though it feels like I’m stepping into a trap, one that I might deserve to be stuck in.

I’ve never been in their apartment before, only Lenore’s. Theirs is protected by a thousand wards, just as Lenore’s was, but I was able to bypass them. Here, though, I feel like I’m walking through quicksand as I push through the doorway and into their kitchen. The pressure builds around my head, my body, making my bones rattle, and then with a pop I’m through.

“Sorry about that,” Jim says, reaching for the coffee pot. “We have to protect ourselves more than ever now. Atlas found us with ease, there could be others.”

“Are there others?” I ask. “Because Lenore is missing. We have no idea where she went, if she went anywhere. But there was the smell of sulfur in the room.” And they, and their house, smells of rich Ethiopian coffee, lavender, sage, dill, and other herbal arrangements. Not a trace of sulfur.

Jim’s hand starts shaking as he attempts to pour the coffee into a mug, and he has to put the pot back on the burner. “Sorry, my arm. After Yanik…”

Any other time I would ask him how he’s doing. I would be cordial. These two are my enemies at heart, not my friends, but there’s always been a distant formality between us in all our dealings.

But this is not that time. There is only one thing to discuss.

“What happened?” Elaine asks, folding her arms across her chest as her eyes burn into mine. “Tell me everything that happened. Did you see who took her? Do you know? Maybe it was a vampire. Were you having a party?”

Her voice is getting higher, more frantic, but I have no inclination to calm her down because I’m not calm myself. I’m barely holding it together.

And I’m bracing myself for what I have to tell her, knowing exactly how she’s going to react. That blade will be in her hand in seconds.

I swallow hard. “I think she’s hurt. There’s so much blood. Everywhere.”

Her eyes go wide. “What?”

“What do you mean, her blood?” Jim says, looking like he’s about to smash the coffee pot over my head. “Did you…were you…”

I shake my head, knowing what he thinks. “No. I was not feeding on her.”

“Well what the fuck happened, Absolon?” Elaine says. “Was someone else? Another vampire?”

“I don’t think so,” I tell them. Shame makes me avert my eyes, concentrating on the water ring stains on the kitchen island. “It was me. I’m the one who hurt her.”

“But you said…” Jim begins.

“How?” Elaine interrupts. Then she reaches out and shoves me on the shoulder, hard enough that I have to look up to meet her eyes, eyes that want to kill me. That knife is singing away. “How did you hurt her?!”

“There’s another part of me,” I say quietly, my voice raw, barely above a whisper and brimming with shame. “A part I’ve lived with for a long time.”

Elaine looks horrified. “No. No, those are supposed to be legends. Fairy-tales.”

“Horror stories,” Jim fills in grimly.

I nod slowly. “They are true. Whatever you’ve heard, it’s probably true. That I carry a beast inside me, that this beast…I have no control over it. I can only keep it buried, but your daughter, she—”

Suddenly the blade is in Elaine’s hand, carved silver and glowing with blue electricity, and she comes at me in a blur that’s fast even for my vampire eyes. She takes the blade and presses it against my chest above my heart, piercing through my t-shirt, pointing into my skin, drawing the faintest bit of blood.

“If you killed her, I will drive this knife straight into your heart and out the other side!” she screams at me, spit flying in my face as she shakes, her eyes glowing with blue crescent moons.

I wrap my hand around the blade, holding it tight, letting the painful pulsing current slice my fingers, make me bleed. “If I killed her, I will be begging you to end my life,” I growl. “I’ll want you to make it hurt. I’ll want to suffer just like I made her suffer.”

Her nose flares with anger, blue lighting now sparking from her eyes, her hair starting to rise like she’s a living wire, a current uncontrolled, and I know how she’s feeling, I know every single part of it, because I feel it too. I feel this wild, uninhibited rage directed at myself, the desire to rip my own fucking head off and shove it down my throat, to kill and torture myself a thousand times over.

“Elaine,” Jim warns her quietly. “This won’t help.”

She ignores him, keeps her fervent eyes on me. “You’re a liar. You always were. She was in love with you, so in love with you, and all I could do was watch. Watch as she gave herself to you, while you possessed her, used her. I thought you loved her!”

“I do!” I roar. “I love her with all my fucking heart, every last shriveled bit of it!”

“Then your love is poison,” she snaps. “Your love is tainted and corrosive and eats away at everything that made her wonderful and good. Your love will be her ruin.”

And I’ve told Lenore as much.

“We don’t know Lenore is dead,” Jim says patiently. “Elaine, please. Step away.”

“Why aren’t you angry?” she screams at him.

“I am angry,” Jim says sharply. He gestures to me. “But he wouldn’t be here right now if he didn’t love Lenore. And killing him isn’t going to help anything. We need to figure out where she is and if she’s alive. And I know you’re as connected to her as I am, but there’s nothing telling me that she’s dead. I would feel it. Something would be severed.”

I close my eyes, trying to concentrate on Lenore. I know she’s not dead either, that she’s out there. I just don’t know where, if she’s still in pain, if she’s going to be okay. If she was taken against her will.

Eventually I feel the pressure and pain lift from my chest and Elaine removes the blade. I open my eyes to see her walk across the kitchen, shaking her head as she looks out the window. Perhaps also putting her feelers out for Lenore.

“So what happened?” Jim asks me.

“I woke up on the bedroom floor. Maybe twenty minutes ago. The bed was broken. There was blood all over the mattress, the rug, the floor. So much blood. Her blood. I have no memory, except for that I knew that the transformation was coming, that I was going to turn into the beast. I told her to run and…she didn’t run. She stayed.”

“Why would she stay?” Elaine wonders out loud, her voice tired.

“Because she doesn’t fear it,” I tell her. “Or at least, she didn’t before.”

“This has happened before?” Jim asks in shock.

“Yes. I’ve turned into the beast with her.”

Elaine whips around to glare at me. “And you hurt her before?”

I shake my head. “No. I never did.”

“Were you in control then?” Jim asks.

I shake my head again. “No. Not really. Maybe it was luck. Either way, I never hurt her until now. She…she always thought she could tame the beast.”

“None of this explains where she is now,” Jim says. “Do you think she went off on her own?”

“She didn’t go through the house, we would know. She went through the window. Five stories up.”

“What?” Elaine exclaims. “Lenore can’t fly.”

“I know. But maybe she could under extreme duress. You saw what happened with the earthquake,” I point out. “That said, it doesn’t explain the sulfur.”

Elaine swallows audibly and looks to Jim. “Do you think it could be the guild? That they kidnapped her?”

“Right after he attacked her?” Jim asks. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would they be there at that time?” He looks to me, puzzled. “And you would still be the beast, wouldn’t you?”

I nod. “I think so. I don’t have memory of transforming back into a vampire. I assume I was still the beast when she left but…” I trail off, feeling so fucking useless.

“If it were someone from the guild, Absolon would be dead then,” Jim surmises. “They would have killed the beast, I’m sure of it. And you don’t think it was a vampire? Perhaps your father?”

My stomach twists violently at the thought. “I would know if it were a vampire. I—”

Suddenly there’s a faint thump from downstairs in Lenore’s apartment. I stand up straighter.

“What is it?” Elaine asks, their human ears unable to pick up on the sound.

I don’t answer, I just run through their ward and down the stairs and they follow after me.