Lord of Eternal Night by Ben Alderson

30

Marius

My body was a prison of agony. Hot, stabbing hunger gripped a hold of my gut and twisted. The pain almost knocked the wind from my lungs, buckled my knees, made my world spin, gripping its sharp talons into my stomach with relentless demand. Yet the feeling was no more painful than the itching that began to spread across my skin. A fire, far greater than what Jak had not long wielded, burned away at me, brought on by the skimming of dawn that washed over the world.

I did not run for cover, not as I watched the river of red spread down his neck, bathing his chest until the dirtied, cream shirt was stained beyond repair. How the colour of life drained from his face, his features relaxing as though he fell into sleep with his wide eyes left open.

So this was what it was like. Death. Inconsolable death, something I had wished upon myself more times than I could count. Usually, when my Claim passed by my doing, I was still in the dissociation brought on by the curse. But Jak had done it, kept me from feeding until daybreak. I had come to hold him in my arms, my teeth grazing his soft, welcoming neck. It was a harsh yanking feeling that felt as though I had woken from a nightmare, gasping for breath as a newborn would.

Jak — despite successfully breaking the curse — had gifted me with a new curse. To watch as he died before me. No longer blessed with being unaware. Detached.

I did not blink. Refused to look away for a moment as the light drained from his beautiful eyes. Eyes I had looked deeply into as I held him. How they would gleam from within when he caught glimpses at me, or spoke on topics he adored. Eyes that I had made weep. Now the bright colouring of blue seemed to fade away to a pale grey, a coating of nothingness passing over them as his stare was lost to me.

One moment he was there, eyes pleading with my own through the windows to his soul. Then like a flame on a candle he was gone. Snuffed out.

“Jak.” I registered the lyrics of his name. Did I speak it? Did someone else dare say it aloud?

I waited for him to register the call and respond. To lift his beautiful, soft-angled face with that smile, the one which lifted from the left corner of his mouth more than the right. The smile that creased three lines beside each of his eyes. How it peaked his brow in an expression that screamed mischief.

I registered nothing but him. Watching his death stilled the hunger that scratched across my consciousness. It nullified the pang of hunger. Like the inside of a shell, my breathing echoed throughout my ears, silencing anything else around me.

It did not last, this peaceful moment as I watched death take him.

My own pain intensified as the sun finally threatened to break the curve of the earth.

Wait. I willed the morning to listen, my shadows slipping away from me as the light joined the funeral. Please, wait.

She spoke, the woman whose greedy grip held onto Jak, the knife still in her hand, dripping blood across the ground. “Come and fetch him.” Her arm loosened around him. My Jak. She spoke again, but I did not register, not over the roaring anger that beat through me.

The noise of his blood dripping across the ground was terrible. Alluring and deadly. My eyes flicked to it, mouth parting, as I watched each splash.

“Jak.” His name again, this time I felt the tug of my lips as I finished speaking. Shouting. I was shouting.

The woman smiled and released her hold on him. One push and he was no longer held upright. His body collapsed beneath him. He fell. I moved.

In a blink he was in my arms. All I could register was his touch, as cold as mine, as blood raced rivers across my torn, charred jacket. I lowered his stiff body to the ground, my hand carefully cupping the back of his head. Someone was crying. Was it me?

I barely felt the growing discomfort anymore, not as I lay him down. All I could focus on was him. Jak. His blood. How it never seemed to stop from pumping out the jagged slice across his neck. I reached my finger for it, fighting the urge to pop a digit in my mouth.

Then a hand reached for my shoulder. A nailed finger, tapping for my attention.

I turned, eyes narrowing against the sudden glare of light. Then the person’s body moved in view of the growing dawn and I saw her smile. Her thin lips parted, revealing the line of perfect white teeth behind them.

“Being locked away all these years… I feel that it is only just I let you watch the sunrise in peace. See it in its glory and know that you will meet my pathetic son in whatever hellscape you visit in the afterlife.”

I registered the murmuring of the group of cloaked figures behind her. And Katharine. Sweet, young Katharine whose scent screamed of fear and panic. She was splayed across the ground, expression a jagged slice of anger and sadness. Her round eyes wet, her lips turned in a snarl.

“Kill them…” I read the shapes of her mouth more than I heard her. The command. Perhaps she spoke something else entirely, but all I could do was think it. Kill them. Kill them.

Devour them.

I looked back to the woman who stands above me, a statue of stone carved from hate.

Her grin hardened. And I smiled back.

“You look just like her,” I said, voice a rumble of deep, scratchy tones. “And I often dreamt of what it would be like to devour her blood after she cursed me.”

The woman, Jak’s mother, lifted the dagger and placed the bloodied tip into the skin of her palm. “And what did you think she would taste like? Sweet revenge, or regret?”

My hold on Jak, his terribly cold body, shuddered as I begun to shake. “I don’t know. But I suppose I am about to find out.”

Her expression faltered and she parted her mouth to spit yet more hate. But this time I did not let her.

In a blink I was before her, my teeth clamped around her neck. She bled freely into my mouth. I sucked. Hard. Harder. Drinking every ounce of her as the warmth of morning intensified.

But her life source filled me with a renewed strength. So I drank on.

No one dared to interrupt.

She could not speak for my bite had ripped into her throat so deeply that only pathetic gurgling could be heard as she struggled.

The batting of her nails against me soon stopped and her arms hung limply at her sides. Her weight fell into me, dead and stiff. Like her son who lay at our feet.

I registered the knife embedded in my gut as I pulled back from her. Looking down, neck straining, I saw the hilt and grabbed it. The slick, wet song made me cringe as I pulled it from me, still gripping onto the dead body in my arm.

There was no pain, not with the thundering of fresh, weak yet powerful blood, joining my own. I cocked my head back, releasing a sigh as her blood began to dry across my chin.

“It tastes like neither,” I spoke to the sky as the euphoria of the feed took me captive for a moment of bliss.

When I was done with her, I did not lower her to the ground gently but simply discarded her with a push.

The sound of her skull cracking against the slabbed ground was a blessing. It echoed through my own mind on a pleasing loop. One I never wished to forget.

I did not bother to wipe the blood from my mouth and chin, not as I roared in the wake of the coven which was already fleeing back towards the waking town. Not a single person stayed to fight. Pointed stakes of wood and sharpened kitchen utensils were discarded across the ground, pointless.

“You need to get to cover.” Katharine’s kind voice registered somewhere within the internal roaring. “Do not die on me too.”

Her words were the anchor I needed from the euphoria. As her soft touch laid across my shoulder, I was brought back to reality.

To this living hell.

I turned to face Katharine who threw her arms around me. She was shaking, violently. Yet I could not find the strength to hold her, not as I looked back to where Jak lay across the ground, whose face was turned away from me.

I winced as more light joined the sky; the first rays of morning finally sliced into existence.

“We need to go now,” Katharine murmured.

“Jak.” I said his name aloud, hoping he would simply roll over and face me as he had so many evenings with me beside him. But he was still.

Katharine tugged at my arm, but I pulled away from her. I would not leave him, not beside the stiffening body of his mother. Stepping over her, I moved for him, Katharine’s pleadings becoming frantic. Jak’s head lolled backwards as I lifted him from the ground, his limbs hard and his body heavier as death truly took a hold of him.

Katharine was already moving towards the castle, beckoning to follow. And I did, slowly, allowing the discomfort to become true, burning pain as the light bathed over me. If I slowed to a stop, would I die with him? Together. The thought did not scare me. But Katharine, she caught my attention. I could not leave her behind.

The ruins of the castle were now empty of Jak’s fire; it had died as the knife was slashed across his throat. Only thick tendrils of smoke remained, walls of grey and silver which seeped up into the sky.

And towards the remains I walked, away from the now destroyed barrier keeping me from the world. I walked towards the charred memory of my life, my death, my eternal. I walked with him in my arms.

Victorya did not greet me as I stepped over the boundary. Nor did the other phantoms of my past as I made my way, from memory, towards the tunnels that would lead to the untouched chamber of darkness.

Katharine led the way, bare feet patting across the ruined floors. I gifted myself small moments to look up as I followed her, quickly snapping my focus back to the boy in my arms.

To Jak.

My Jak.

It had never ended this way. With me aware as I held the remains of a Claim. Not since the first. Not since I carried another boy named Jak. Full circle. That was how it felt.

I felt tired. More so as we finally stepped beneath the shattered doorway into the shadowed pathway which led to the underbelly of the castle. Only the smell of burning stone and wood lingered here.

It did not matter. His fire could have burned this entire place until it was nothing more than ash. I would not have cared. Not if it meant he was alive.

With me.

Seeing through to morning as he had wished.

I believed Katharine was talking. To me or herself, I was not sure.

There were no words I could muster in return, not as I willed to share in the same deathly silence of the boy in my arms. I feared that I would speak and miss a movement from him. A subtle noise or pinch of his expression that would prove that this was all an illusion. A nasty joke he played on me.

Then I stopped, bumping into Katharine who blocked the way ahead. I then looked up and saw that we were in the small chamber. Melted, broken chains lay at our feet. Did I break out? Did the fire burn them? The padlock was a mess of melted iron.

“You should lay him down, Marius.”

I wanted to refuse her aloud, but I barely managed to shake my head to disregard her suggestion.

Then her small, dirtied and worn hands reached for Jak cautiously. “I understand you’re hurt. Believe me. But you must lay him to rest.”

“He is still bleeding,” I croaked, voice hoarse and throat sore. “I pushed him towards her, it’s my fault. And he still bleeds, long after his mother has stopped bleeding herself.”

“Rest him in the coffin, Marius, lay him down.”

Did she not hear me?

I stared at the blood, how it now looked deep obsidian in the dark room. A river of black blood now covered my arms, chest and hands. But not once did I dare reach down and taste. I was not full, far from it. But the feeling, the craving of urgency had left with the arrival of dawn.

Control had returned, but at the price of his life.

At some point Katharine guided me by the elbow deeper into the room. I kicked the base of the wooden framed coffin and came to a stop. With great regret I lowered Jak down into the coffin, mind screaming for me to keep him in my arms. But a single thought would not let up as I stared down at his seemingly sleeping expression.

“I could heal him,” I said to Katharine. “How I healed you. Your mother. Bring him back.”

I saw the wince in Katharine’s face from across the coffin. But with her mundane eyes she would not see my expression, or lack thereof.

“The dead cannot be healed. Only the living. He is gone, Marius. I am sorry.”

I felt a bubble of defiance rush to the surface of my soul. I bit down onto my own lip, breaking skin until my mouth filled with my own blood. I recoiled at the taste of my life force. Bitter, aged and stale.

“How can you explain such philosophy when I am dead, yet can withstand all but daylight…?” I broke the silence, mind burning with determination. “He burned me with fire, I survived. I live years without warmth in my skin. I am death, yet I carry on. If I do not try, I will never forgive myself.”

One glance into Katharine’s eyes and I witnessed her understanding, far before my own caught up to me.

“Will it work?”

My sharp nail was already pressed against my upper arm. I did not register the nick as it broke my skin as I muttered, “For my sake, and the world beyond this place, I hope so.”

I learned long ago that the curse was rooted in blood. A defiance of eternal life that had to be refilled from year to year. For my blood was life force, and not mine at all. It was the remnants from each Claim.

Yet this was different. My body should be filled with Jak’s essence. I should desire to feed from him, even now. But I did not.

Had the curse truly broken? Or just fractured?

The trickle of blood ran down my forearm, racing around my wrist like a circlet of ruby before dripping towards the slightly parted mouth of my love. My Jak.

With precision, each droplet never missed the darkness that waited for it. Drip. Drip. Drip. His lips were terribly white. Drip. Drip. Drip. I traced my nail further down my arm in a straight line, urging for more of my blood to spill. Drip. Drip. Drip. My will filled each droplet, carrying my pleading deep within Jak’s still, stiffened body.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

My strength flooded from me, flowing into him. Each moment I felt myself growing tired. Blinking became heavier, slower. Each time the skin on my arm knitted back together, I tore it wide open. Shaking my head, I growled with frustration, trying to keep my eyes on him. But they were growing heavier as more of my blood spilled.

Drip.

Drip.

Drip.

“Wake, my love. For I do not think I can bear the wait to see you again in death.”