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THE KINDRED SPIRIT
by
Disclaimer:
This story depicts scenes of extreme violence and/or torture and their aftermath. Readers who are disturbed by or are sensitive to this type of depiction may wish to read something other than this story.
This story makes reference to sexual violence and/or their aftermath. Some readers may be disturbed by this type of depiction and anyone who is sensitive to this particular issue may wish to read something other than this story.
This story hints at a love/sexual relationship between two consenting adult women. If you are under 18 years of age or if this type of story is illegal in the state or country in which you live, please do not read it. If depictions of this nature disturbs you; you may wish to read something other than this story.
I certainly couldn't live with myself, if I didn't stop to give thanks to my Lover for continued encouragement, the BardicCircle, for showing much patience in regards to my absence, to Kamouraskan and Lariel, who know some of the Hell I've gone through the past year and who have been wonderful friends throughout it all. Thanks to Lariel, Jlynn, Angelrad, and Extra for sharing their betaing skills. And thanks especially to the Creator whose grace has allowed me to remain among the living.
© October 2001-October 2002
Reckoning
We are called Kindred, the Brood, the Undead, and the Vampire. For several decades now Hollywood has tried to romanticize, glamorize, and clean us up. Books have been written about us by those who wish to make us appear as kindly, even gentle natured monsters that feed only out of necessity and only upon those who are deserving of such ill fate. Our kind has been used as superheroes championing mankind because of some deep-seated guilt or compassion towards those who are weaker than we ourselves. We have been made heroic dark knights protecting the defenseless and taking our nourishment only from those who have lost their innocence.
Lies!
There are lies told to make you unafraid to venture out alone into the night, to make you less wary of our existence. - Fables recounted to lull you into the secure belief that not all vampires are bad. I believed them once. I believed that good could be found everywhere and in any being that walked the earth. That for every bad vampire that killed indiscriminately and brutally, there was one who slay only the deserving, such as murderers, rapists, thieves, and pimps who made their money on the backs of frightened runaways and kids with broken dreams.
I was wrong. The way of the Kindred is about pain, degradation, blood, and death - for you and for us. There are those who master and those who are mastered.
I had fancied myself above it all. I am called Pharoc Namoret Aushanti. I am Kindred. I was brought over and deserted when I was very young. I hid and watched, quaking with terror, as my Maker was staked by simple villagers then burned on a crudely made cross. It was different then; we were both the hunters and the hunted. But that was long ago. Centuries have passed and new ideas began to form about my kind. Lies. And even I believed them. I was arrogant in the belief of my own righteous calling. I began to think of myself as mankind's Avenging Angel. I preyed only on the criminal; those mortals who had committed violent acts against their own.
I was convinced that my own vile nature could be redeemed and justified by my acts of valor. I have slain my own kind in defense of the innocent. I have ripped beating hearts from beneath the breasts of drug lords and feasted upon them while they watched, faces painted with terror and pain as I ate life, their life. I have cornered rapists in the very alleys they would stalk their victims and I toyed with them, ripping away their genitalia, sometimes making them eat of their own flesh before I ended their pathetic lives. I've blinded men who peeked through curtains while little girls bathed or dressed, unaware of their malignant observers.
For all my self-righteous bolstering, I was no more than a monster. The worst of my kind; a monster that does not recognize its own darkness for what it is.
She saved me. Arrabon Van Roth. She came upon me suddenly, so intent was I in making a kill, I had not felt her approach. It was late, well past midnight. I had been tracking the police's efforts in solving a case of a young girl, aged ten, who'd been brutally raped and murdered. Her body had been dumped in the city's landfill. They had been no closer to solving the case than they had been to finding her when her distraught parents had first reported her missing. But I had found him. I was going to punish him and make him relive, in his own pain, a hundred fold in recompense for the torment he had visited on that innocent child.
I smelled his fear. I could taste it on the air and I breathed it in, allowing it to soak through my skin. I had yet to hurt him. I had only shown him my true face, allowed him to see through the mask his harbinger of death wore. When I reached for him, intending to take my time peeling away his flesh, I felt my arm held in a grip that I could not escape. I was flung aside and fell in a heap atop a pile of loose asphalt and brick. She approached my kill and grabbed him up by the throat. Turning with him so that his back now faced the entrance and only exit of the alleyway, she shook him like a toy trapped between a hound's teeth. The smell of urine and defecation permeated the narrow space and his screams were like those of the dying. I understood his fear. Despite my strength and immortality, it would be a lie if I did not confess that I, too, was afraid of this dark demon, and I had yet to see her face. I knew with an instinct born of my kind that she was no champion to justice. Her piercing laughter rang out, painfully sharp. I flinched from the shrillness of it. What blood I possessed in my veins froze and I felt chilled as she set the murdering rapist back down onto his feet.
"Run. Hide, you pathetic excuse for a meal," she taunted him as he stumbled backwards falling to his ass onto the hard pavement. Smiling broadly, she displayed her fangs for him and a curdling cry of horror burst from his mouth as she moved towards him. Too shaken to stand, he began to hastily crab walk his way out of the ally. "Rest assured," she promised him, "we will meet again."
She let him go! Angry that she would dismiss so easily a man who had done such horrible things to an innocent, I stood and turned on her. I was enraged that she had prevented justice from being delivered. My blue eyes hardened into deadly slits, warning her of my displeasure. I towered over her and felt assured within myself that, though she had at first caught me unaware, I now held the advantage. She merely eyed me speculatively; waiting, I presumed, for me to speak. I stepped towards her so that only a few feet's distance took up space between us. She appeared unmoved by my intended intimidation. She linked her hands together behind her back and assumed a relaxed posture.
"You just let that murdering cretin go free!" I hissed at her. "Do you realize what you've done? How many more innocents he might harm?"
"Compared to our kind," she said unemotionally, gesturing to the route my intended kill had used to escape, "they are all innocents."
"How can you say that?" I growled. "He is a killer and a rapist, preying on those too weak to defend themselves against his kind. He is a monster." I made my case passionately and she just shrugged.
"And how does that make you different?" she asked me. "Are your victims strong enough to defend against you? Were they, any of them, able to fend you off as you mercilessly beat, tortured, raped, and killed them?" Her eyes remained unreadable, but her lips twitched into a smug grin. I stared at her, aghast that she would suggest my deeds were less than noble. "Umm." She closed the distance between us. "And tell me," she moved closer so that we were side-to-side but facing in opposite directions, stopping to peer up at me tauntingly, "if you were so keen on delivering justice, why not hand your little criminals over to the authorities? Humh?" She smiled, leaning towards me her whisper reaching up to my ear. "And while I do love your wicked sense of reparation, Pharoc, I hardly expect your dead villains have learned anything from your particular brand of justice, nor have you deterred others from following in their predecessors' shoes."
"I have made a difference," I argued heatedly. "Those whom I have killed will not harm other innocents."
"Ah yes." She tilted her pale blonde head to the right and studied me solemnly. "And tell me, champion of the innocent, have you made the streets safer to roam at night?" She shook her head and her lips curled upward in disgust. "You are the worst villain of them all Pharoc; disguising your need to feed on these mortals behind the veil of the heroic defender." She moved behind me, pressing into me with her body. "And did you feel remorse when you drained the lives from their bodies? Did you feel regret as they begged you for mercy? Did your heart swell with sorrow as they lay dead or dying at your feet?" There was a sharp pain at the back of my scalp as she fisted strands of my hair and yanked until my head fell back; her lips caressed my lobe and then she spoke derisively into my ear, evoking shivers of fear and pleasure down my spine. "And did you then repent for being the murderous ogre that you are?" She yanked again, forcing me to my knees. I would have cried out in pain but I refused to give her that satisfaction. She held me back against her, my shoulder pressing into the heat between her thighs. I stifled a panicky gasp as I realized I was helpless to move. "You have murdered your brothers and sisters, Pharoc. In your blind arrogance you have slain Kindred. And that does not go unpunished."
What does one say or do when brought face to face with the demon within? I did not speak. If I felt any sorrow at all it was because I felt no sorrow or guilt over my deeds or the pleasure I had received from them.
Shivering like a child in the cold, I asked, "Who are you?"
"Justice." She bowed at the waist and grinned against my ear. "I am your new master. I am your judge. I am that demon you feared within you. I will feel no remorse when you lay before me torn, bloodied, and begging for mercy." She gave another painful yank on my hair, causing me to wince.
"Never," I growled rebelliously. I glanced up as a tall creature approached, shadowing me with his intimidating form. He moved to stand behind me and I tensed perceptively, unnerved by not knowing what to expect.
"Oh..." I could feel her snide smile. "…I think you will." That said, she moved to stand in front of me and then squatted until we were eye level. She muttered a few words in a language so ancient that even I did not know them. The pain that ripped through me forced me forward to my hands and knees. I groaned in agony at the fire in my belly and slumped completely forward to the ground, barely missing smashing my face into the hard asphalt. I felt weak; as though life were draining from me. I heard her laughter over my head and opened my eyes to find a pair of black spike heels at my chin. "You may call me Arrabon." She was chuckling above me. I rolled over onto my back and stared up at her. "Bring her, Gaston." I forced myself to my sit up. I was determined to fight. I wasn't going to be taken anywhere! I stood shakily to my feet and was caught off guard by the pain from a blow to the back of my neck. And then there was nothing.
Recompense
I faded in and out for a while and regained full consciousness with a suddenness that I had long ago grown accustomed to. Immediately aware of and alarmed by the restriction of movement, I cried out in rage, yanking violently against my bonds. I fought and strained for freedom, howling and snarling like an ensnared dog. My bindings only tightened with my struggles. Exhausted from my futile battle, I could feel the perspiration beading across my skin in fat droplets of blood mingled with sweat, trickling down my flesh to slip between my toes. I had succeeded only in weakening myself more.
The fight had gone out of me for a time, and I became aware of the darkness that engulfed me. The muscles in my face tightened in a confused scowl as I tried to fathom how I could be devoid of sight after centuries of never having known total darkness. Horrified by the ramification that I had been blinded, I inhaled and exhaled in desperate gulps. I was terrified, a sensation I had not experienced in a millennium. My heart slammed repeatedly against my breastbone and my skin tingled and stung as my anxiety dripped from my pores in the guise of sweat. All around me was silence. I turned my head sharply in each direction, straining to hear the slightest sound that would alert me to another's presence or approach. I was alone.
I lost all sense of time unsure of whether I had been tethered for days, hours, or minutes. Hunger came and with it a gnawing burning awareness in the pit of my stomach as I began to cramp. I moaned in discomfort and would have curled into myself had I the freedom of movement.
I had to have been there for weeks for the hunger to have overtaken me with such fury. I was dying. I could feel it. Once again I strained for freedom to no purchase. Death! "Arrabon!" I cried out my captor's name. My eyes were immediately assaulted with light. There she sat, as motionless as sculpted marble, so close to me, that had I mobility I could have touched her lips with my own. All that time I had believed myself alone in my dark hell, but I'd had an audience of at least one.
"Hello, Pharoc." Arrabon smiled, speaking my name softly in intimate tone as though we were lovers. I could only stare into sea green eyes with the knowledge that she had been there; a witness to many fragile moments. Moments when, feeling insanity's razor sharpened claws embedded in my skull, I had breathed out in fragmented whispers and broken sobs events in my life that I had never wished to recall.
"Pharoc, I have waited and watched for this experience with you. I have built this place for just such an occasion. This is your new home." She gestured in a grand sweeping motion, standing to walk around the huge stark room. There were no doors that I could discern; but Arrabon had to have left a few times to feed and so I was certain there had to be at least one exit. The walls were pale blue. The room itself was oval in shape. The floor was painted black and the only furniture was the raised slate gray platform on which I was being held and the plain metal folding chair from which she had just risen.
"Position her now," Arrabon said, but I had no time to wonder to whom she spoke. I grimaced in pain as my bonds began to constrict.
The manacles bit painfully into the flesh of my ankles and wrists and held me secure in the center of the small platform Arrabon had constructed. I was bathed in light and displayed for her, standing spread-eagled. My shackles were pulled taut straining the muscles of my arms and legs. The tightening of the chains securing the manacles at my wrists forced me to the tips of my toes so that I was partially dangling above the floor. I let out a grunt of discomfort as the chain was drawn tighter still until I feared my limbs would be torn from their sockets. Her green eyes glowed softy as she studied her handiwork. I would have looked away in shame, but I was helplessly under her control and could not avert my gaze until she willed it. There was a slight jerking and I was tilted slightly; my feet now completely off the floor. I was raised just above the platform in a forty-five degree angle.
At this angle, I was completely exposed to any who would choose to look upon me. I was defenseless against anyone who might choose to take me. My eyes widened in fear at that realization. Arrabon smiled in appreciation of my fear. "Now," she spoke coolly, "you are the innocent, you are the defenseless." Her sneer caused my stomach to lurch sickeningly. "Would you have me be merciful?" she whispered. "Would you have me spare you the pain that is sure to follow?" Though I could neither turn my head nor look away, I refused to speak. She merely nodded as though having premeditated my response. I never noticed another presence until an unfamiliar and harsh voice spoke.
"She is insolent, Mistress. Shall I whip her?" I heard her attendant ask eagerly. Arrabon's face clouded with anger.
"Touch her," she spoke with detachment. "And you, Gaston, will bake in the sun."
"I meant no disrespect, Mistress." I watched quietly as the hulking creature that had carried me tossed on his back like a weightless piece of cloth threw himself at her feet, begging her forgiveness.
"Then no disrespect was taken." She stared down at the abase creature. "But my laws are to be obeyed in all ways. What is mine shall never be touched unless I will it. You may not ask nor even want unless I permit that want."
"Yes," he whispered kissing the tips of her black boots reverently.
"Now, bring me the mortal and the things I requested." Gaston stood quickly and with a knowing leer cast in my direction he turned back to her and nodded with abject worship. I thought I might be sick by this pathetic display. When he had gone she turned her gaze upon my face, studying my eyes with careful scrutiny. "Gaston's devotion to me sickens you, doesn't it?" She smiled when no answer was forthcoming. "It's alright." She nodded knowingly. "I can read your mind." I was deflated by that admission. Knowing that there was no part of me left unexposed for her scrutiny left me feeling raped, violated. She was standing beside, me her hands clasped behind her back. "You, little sister, have been away from the brood for much too long. You have no concept of our laws. In the brood you are either master or mastered."
"I am not brood," I whispered sharply. "I am nothing like you," I hissed angrily, straining once again against my shackles.
"You are kindred, Pharoc, my kindred and you should have been brought to me immediately after your making. But your Maker was an arrogant fool. And for that he paid with his life. I watched for a while, wondering whether it was best to leave you on your own, to bring you in, or destroy you. It wasn't until you fell prey to the very fantasy we created to safeguard ourselves in this century that I made my decision. You fell even quicker for the lie than humanity." She shook her head in disgust as she stared at me green eyes hard and icy. "We are brood. We are neither their champions nor their friends; we are not their keepers. They are cattle, meat, and deer for the hunt. You know not your nature, Pharoc. But you will learn." Her eyes hardened with fury. "You will learn or you will die."
"Bleed her." Released from her gaze, I glanced at the place where Gaston now stood with a pale and trembling young woman. The woman looked to be in her late twenties. Her hazel eyes were lifeless and dull. She allowed herself to be moved towards the platform with neither protest nor the slightest hint that she was even aware of what was happening to her. I swallowed hard, my stomach roiling at what I knew Arrabon had in mind. At the same time my hunger intensified with a ravenous vengeance as the mortal woman was brought closer to us. Gaston stood the woman facing me to my right. He raised her wrist to my eye level and made a semi deep cut. The blood bubbled immediately to the surface, dripping to the floor with soft spatters that echoed loudly in my head. My fangs extended painfully, and my stomach clenched tightly as though it were caving in on itself.
"You are so hungry, my Pet," Arrabon spoke softly into my left ear. "I would be willing to let you feed." She gave a nod to Gaston who brought the gashed wrist just inches from my tightly clamped lips. "No?" Arrabon questioned softly. I gritted my teeth in an effort to restrain my hunger. "I will not offer so generously again," Arrabon whispered into my ear. "The next time, dear you'll have to beg." I would not feed on an innocent, I vowed inwardly. She smiled at me, tsking gently, then glanced again to her servant. "Well then Gaston, have a little reward for your hard work." Her voice took on a hard edge, "and I do mean little reward and then take our mortal back to her room for now. Pharoc hasn't work up enough of an appetite yet." Gaston nodded to her respectfully and cast a sneer in my direction before eagerly dragging the woman away. The lights dimmed and only she and I remained illuminated in the soft circle of light above the platform.
Arrabon captured my gaze once more. "Put up all the fight you want for now, my young insolent friend. But rest assured before long you will be begging me to allow you to feed from her." She moved to sit back in her chair just to the right of my head. She tilted her head arrogantly to the right and bared her fangs. "And you'll do whatever I want, Pharoc for just a drop of that precious innocent blood." We remained in silence and then she was gone for a while. It had to have been at least a day; long enough for me to become desolate in my isolation.
After a time her voice penetrated the silence and I was grateful to turn my thoughts from the gnawing hunger. She explained to me that there was a reason our kind had managed to escape extinction for as long as we have. I was a threat to that. My brutal vigilante antics were creating a scare among the public. It didn't matter that I had so far only attacked criminals. Authorities investigating my violent kills had brought in criminologists who had reasoned that my so-called sociopath behavior would soon turn its attention onto innocent law abiding citizens. I had been unaware of this. It was Arrabon who had informed me of the investigations that had been turned onto what the Authorities had been calling the Midnight Slayer. She laughed at my indignation.
"Did you think the mortals would celebrate your vigilance?" She mocked me with a knowing smile. "Do you even know why," she leaned closer to whisper in my ear, "why your kills are so brutal, Pharoc?" she met my stare with an intense questioning gaze. "I imagine that all this time," she continued, "you believed that you were simply meting out punishment." She smiled patiently at me. "You never questioned the quivering rage that filled you during a kill, did you? Or how with each hunt the hunger for violence and brutality seemed to intensify?"
I could only stare at her solemnly, my hunger making it difficult for me to concentrate on anything but her words. I could not stand the thought of trying to muster up the strength to speak. Speaking caused the sound of my voice to rumble deep within the hollowness of my belly. She knew this. "You cannot place restrictions upon your nature without disastrous repercussions." She looked me over slowly, her eyes scorching my skin with their intensity. "When you cage the animal, Pharoc, it becomes more vicious, more dangerous in its desire for freedom."
"I did nothing they did not deserve." I spoke finally despite my agonizing hunger. I would not allow my deeds to be reduced to nothing more than animalistic attacks. I shuddered as the vibration of my voice rumbled deep within my empty stomach. I had no desire but to curl in on myself like a child, but I was determined to defend myself. "I have never taken life for the mere enjoyment of the kill. I have never..."
"You protest so readily." Arrabon shook her head and sighed. "You've no idea of what you have become, have you? Mortals are no more of consequence to us, Pharoc, then their furry little beasts are to them." She looked upon me with disgust. "Even they are aware of the laws of nature and survival, and the laws of the food chain. Everything is ruled by the survival of the fittest. Only the strong, my dark misguided angel, will escape extinction. Those mortals who are too weak to safeguard their own survival will always fall prey to those predators who are stronger and wiser than they. Those who have the will to survive are those wise enough to avoid the unsafe streets and alleys at night, those who do not venture out alone during the hours of hunting time. All others are merely fated to weeding out by our kind."
"They have souls, Arrabon," I whispered in an attempt to make her understand. I quivered now with the exhausting effort of speech. "They have souls. They are sentient." I spoke in shallow gasps. "They are not pack mules or wild rabbits lent to us for the hunt."
"According to whose laws?" Her green eyes darkened and held me still. "Does the deer fight for that last moment of quivering breath, Pharoc? Does it not understand the possibility of its demise?" She smiled gently. 'Have you ever looked a dying animal in the eyes, a cat or dog?" she asked me softly. I nodded solemnly having come across a raccoon that had been shot by a hunter's rifle once. I had mourned as I took it into my arms for its last breath. I knew she had seen this in my mind. "In that last moment of life did it not seem closer to human than the hunter who had shot it? Could you feel its need for life, its desire to continue?" I squeezed my eyes tight against the stinging tears. "No one is above the laws of nature, Pharoc, not even the Brood."
She stood up pushing the chair beside her away. I watched her closely wary of what was to come. She disappeared out of the luminosity for a brief period, and returned carrying with her a small brief case. She played with a panel and what appeared to be a tripod extended from one side of the case. I swallowed and took in a shallow breath certain that things were about to become more uncomfortable for me. My heart skittered like a frightened mouse as the rest of case, propped now on the tripod, clicked open for her. She was hidden from me behind the opened container and when she glanced at me from around the lid I could not contain the fear I felt.
"Are you going to kill me?" I whispered.
"I would have told you, if that were my plan for you," She responded quietly and said nothing else. She removed from the case a long cylindrical object with a flared end that looked like a sculpted claw. She held it up for closer inspection. She pressed in on the sides that she held in her right hand and I saw a blue electric discharge of light accompanied by the sound of snapping and crackling static. "Do you know what I've done to you?" she asked softly. "Do you understand why you feel so weak, so ... mortal?" I shook my head but never took my eyes from the object she held threateningly in her hand. I was afraid. "Your maker," she paused, "was from my blood line. And you," she whispered, "are therefore of my bloodline and subject to my control. It was his duty to bring you to me to learn of our ways. Instead he sought to make his own bloodline, with you as his first fledgling. The first law of my blood is to never take what is mine and you, Pharoc, are mine to do with as I please." She walked towards me slowly. "Our blood link allows me control of you always. I could have stopped your pitiful attempts at crusading with a mere thought. But you would not have learned and lacking an understanding of our ways, you would have rebelled at my summoning until I would have been forced to destroy you as I did your Maker."
"It is within my power to leave you as you are, helpless as a babe and deposit you in the alley I found you." She smiled as I shuddered. "Do you know what vile things would be visited upon you then? I am the only thing standing between you and the vengeful cravings of the other Kindred. Because you are mine they will not touch you. They have not touched you, but once I reject you, you will be fair game and I assure you it is not your death they seek." She twirled the menacing device in her hands. My eyes tracked it nervously as she toyed with it, occasionally pressing the buttons that caused that horrendous crackling light show.
"But even I have rules that I must follow." Her eyes surveyed the length of my body as though she were trying to decide where to begin. "I have been lenient because of your ignorance. I have been complacent because of your confusion, but I will not allow your crimes against our kind and the danger you nearly placed us in to go unanswered for." She placed the claw of the cylindrical object over my right breast and it rested firmly there pressing into the soft flesh. I drew in a sharp breath. "And should you remain stubborn enough to defy me," she whispered, "I will turn you over to your brothers and sisters who ache with the sting of your betrayal." Even knowing what was about to happen, I was still unprepared for the brutal assault of the electricity that scorched through my right breast and ran through every nerve in my body. She never remained in the same place after three ministrations of those jolts. I never knew where she would touch me with the accursed thing. After a time I didn't care; I only knew the pain was unbearable. I didn't scream at first but eventually my throat became so hoarse from cries of agony that I could only whimper.
Much later when I had not the strength for tears and she had taken her pleasure from my pain, my limp body supported, only by the bonds that chained me was a study in continuous pain. There was no part of me that did not hurt. And as she moved her cool marble-like fingers across my bare stinging flesh, she knew this. My nerves jumped unbearably from her touch. She looked into my eyes, eyes that I knew flashed at her with anger and rage. I had not learned my lesson and she had known that I would still be defiant.
"How much longer before you are so weakened by hunger and torture, that you lose all sanity and reason?" she questioned me dispassionately. "Have you ever seen the outcast among the Brood?" I whimpered softly. I had seen them. They reviled me. Too weak to hunt they lived on scurrying rodents and lame animals that wandered onto back streets and deserted buildings. They are robbed of sanity by the constant hunger, that hunger which animal blood could not satiate. They are to my kind what the leper colonies at one time were to mortals. "You're getting hungrier."
"I will escape this place," I gasped with more bravado than I actually felt.
" Right." She nodded placatingly. "Well until then, shall we continue with our fun?" My body shivered violently at her menacing tone and I nearly wept with fear and frustration as she approached her briefcase again. I closed my eyes, waiting quietly for the pain and gasped as her hands slipped around my neck, securing a collar and locking it into place. My eyes opened sharply as she leaned over me and looked gently into my face. She smiled then and for a moment I forgot that she was my captor. Her green eyes twinkled with merriment and her slight frame, which I had guessed to be not much taller than five feet- six inches, was relaxed. She moved quickly, releasing me from my shackles. I stumbled but she was there, holding me up until life returned to my limbs and though I was weak I felt the power of mobility returned to me. She moved from the platform and I followed behind her. As we reached the floor I stood more steadily on my feet, towering over her by five inches. "It's early still," she spoke, not bothering to turn and look at me. "The others will have just returned and have begun satiating other desires." She smiled over her shoulder at me. I was shaken by the feral hunger behind those green orbs. "There are many things you must know about our kind. Things you have never experienced, our strong bond and kinship. Our sacred trust in each other ... our passion."
She turned and faced me completely. Her robe clad form brushed against my sensitive skin, evoking a gasp from my lips. "We are a very passionate people, Pharoc. Our lust for sexual satiation is rivaled only by our lust for blood." She raised a finger to my lips and caressed them teasingly. A smile played at her lips as I inhaled sharply. "Come." As we neared where I assumed the entrance and exit to be concealed she paused. "Pharoc." She gave no hint to her intentions. "Although, you have stated your intentions to escape," She smiled innocently enough, "I would suggest that…" I cried out in pain from the blow to my gut and was bent at the waist as my eyes teared, "for a time," she continued "you put the idea out of your head." I nodded and coughed trying to catch the breath she'd knocked out of me. I stood up straight despite the pain in my ribs from her strike and managed to keep up with her as she glided through the tunnels of my prison. She continued talking as though nothing had happened. "There are things you will learn, Pharoc. As brood you cannot be without this knowledge. For instance..." she paused and turned to face me, stopping so abruptly, that I nearly ran into her.
She smiled at me. "There are those of our kind who cannot shape shift." She threw her head back and laughed at my wide-eyed expression. Shape shift! "Fortunately for us that is not the case." She eyed me patiently, waiting for me to ingest what I was hearing. I merely stared at her like a mute fool, unable to believe what she was telling me. The thought that I could change forms never once, in as many years that I walked the earth, entered my mind.
"Any shape or form so long as it is not still life, such as trees or rocks." She winked and giggled. "You can even manipulate your form until you become nothing but mist." She turned around and continued walking and I stumbled after her like a gawking child. "We all possess the ability to make other vampires. Merely by sharing our own blood once we have drained the person we wish to embrace." As we walked for what seemed an eternity, she told me more.
My heart was hammering wildly in my chest. Exhilaration flooded my veins. These were things I wanted ... needed to know. And she would teach me! "Wait!" I cried out suddenly. She spun about and pinned me with a stern gaze. I swallowed hard. "Why ... why would you teach me these things?" I asked suspiciously, "When I have told you of my intention to escape?" She looked at me as though I had committed some great offense then shook her head as though confused by my question.
"You are Kindred." Her eyes softened. "Should you prove smart enough to escape you will need these abilities to survive. And you will have proven yourself worthy of the chance of survival." She smiled knowingly. "You will need to be able to change your appearance from time to time. And you may need to embrace another if for nothing else but to gain an ally." She yanked gently on the leash, lowering my head so that we were at equal height. "You are one of my own. This knowledge is yours by right. You are kindred. I will not have you ignorant."
"But why, Arrabon?" I asked confused. I searched her eyes for hidden agenda. "Why would you bother to teach me anything when you hate me so?" She brought her face closer to my own and at once I was struck at how beautiful she was. Her pale skin reminded me of the soft reflection of moonlight on the ocean. Her eyes were as brilliant as any uncut jade I'd seen in my travels in China. I was assaulted by the memory of her fine hair moving across my skin as she'd placed the leash around my neck. It had been softer then silk.
"I don't hate you." Warm air from her breath caressed my cheek when she spoke, and I trembled afraid of what was happening inside me. "I never once hated you, Pharoc." Her eyes glowed with understanding. "None of what I subject you to is due to hatred. If you were lost and confused for a time, my love, that is not your fault." She caressed my cheek with her free hand.
"Then why?" I asked, reliving the pain she had earlier subjected me to. "Why, Arrabon?
"Because." She kissed me gently on the lips. "I want you home." She tugged on the leash and straightened, indicating that I should do so as well, "and this," she whispered before resuming our walk, "Is the only way."
The Beginning
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"I'm not bad. I just write that way."