Dark Requiem (The Darkling Trilogy, Book 3) (5 page)

His lips spread into a
grin that was similar to a wild animal baring its teeth.

“
I like you, Dallas. I
really do. I genuinely feel quite sad about the fact that I’m going
to kill you.”

I felt the blood drain
from my face. I dropped my hand.

“
Okay, if you won’t turn
me into a vampire, I’ll find someone who will.” I turned towards my
suitcase, but he was already standing by it, holding the
handle.

“
I’m afraid it’s too late
for that.”

I took a step back and
then turned and ran. I was only able to take one leap forward
through the high grass before he appeared before me. I ran straight
into his arms which he locked around me.

I screamed.

“
Stop, stop,
please
,” I cried. “He’ll
kill you and he’ll kill Maryse. Please, let me go!”

I was crying now, but
there was no empathy in his eyes, only the careful scrutiny of a
cold-blooded killer.

“
Poor Dallas.” He drew me
closer, one hand around my waist, the other tangled in my hair,
keeping my head still whilst he trailed his cool lips across my
cheek and down to nuzzle my neck. “Your sixth sense is very strong,
but it doesn’t tell you everything, does it?”

He brought his head up to
look into my face, the throbbing anger boring into me.

“
You see, it was right
when it told you my mother’s name and that she’s the reason I
turned Maryse instead of killing her. But it didn’t tell you I
killed my mother a few days after I was turned into a vampire and
that mentioning her was not a clever thing to have
done.”

“
You...you won’t kill me,”
I said with a whimper.

I had seen a rock hidden
in the grass a few feet away. If I could somehow trip him up and
get my hands on it, maybe I could stun him long enough to get
away.

“
I loved my mother and yet
I still killed her,” he continued with a faraway look in his eyes.
“It’s what vampires do, my dear. We kill people. I’m sorry you’re
finding that out the hard way.”

My fear swelled and blind
panic made my knees almost give way beneath me. I focused all my
attention on the rock, thinking of how to get to it. To my
surprise, I felt a pulse within me at the same time it moved, like
someone had nudged it with their foot.

Hope swelled, sharpening
my focus, and as I honed in on that pulse I felt something within
me shift, like a lock clicking into place.

“
And I have to say,”
Shadrach continued, “you don’t look anywhere near as good as you
think you do.”

My gaze flew away from the
rock to stare at him in anger and disbelief. The malevolence had
vanished and I saw warmth along with amusement in his
eyes.

That amusement made my
anger rise and the pulse turned into a violent tremor. The rock
sprung up and flew through the air straight toward
Shadrach.

It would have cracked
against his head if he hadn’t plucked it from the air with one
hand, his gaze never leaving mine.

“
Telekinesis? Impressive.”
He tossed the rock away. “You really are not what you appear to be,
but luckily for me, you haven’t learned how to use all your gifts.
But thank you for giving me those delectable mental images.” He
trailed his fingers down the front of my dress until his hand found
its way down to cup my breast. His other hand tugged down on my
hair, pulling my head back. “It will make this so much more
enjoyable.”

I looked on in complete
terror when I saw his incisors begin to lengthen. He tilted his
head back, bared his teeth, and brought his mouth down on my
neck.

Burning pain shot through
me. He began to draw in deep mouthfuls of my blood. I trembled and
sagged against him.

Oh my God. What have I
done? Avery, Avery.
Tears fell down my
face. I would never see him again.
Avery,
Avery...I...

Shadows pressed in around
me. The ochre sky along with the oak trees leaning conspiratorially
toward us dipped into darkness and everything ceased to
be.

The next thing I
remembered was opening my eyes to a dark room. It appeared night
had long fallen. I could make out a blurry shape looming over me. A
hand gently slapped my cheek.

“
Avery?” I
whispered.

I felt cool skin against
my lips and then a hot, viscous liquid.

“
Quickly, Dallas, drink
it. I can’t give you too much of my blood so we have to do this
quickly.”

I vaguely recognised the
voice, but everything was so confusing. I didn’t know where I was
or what had happened. All I could remember was that I was trying to
do something important and it involved... Memory crept just out of
reach, but I knew I had to drink...

Blood.

It was blood I could feel
against my lips. Yes, I had to drink his blood.

I let my lips close around
the cool, hard wrist and began to drink. I had expected the
slightly salty taste of human blood, but this was different. It was
richer, the taste an unearthly fusion of sweet and savoury that
words could grasp at but never hope to describe. I didn’t even need
to suck at the wrist because the blood seemed to have a will of its
own and forced its way into my mouth and down my throat.

“
There’s a good girl,”
Shadrach said. He stroked my cheek.

I closed my eyes, trying
not to choke against the blood entering me: pouring down my throat
and invading all of me as it reached out unnatural tentacles as far
as my fingertips.

My mind was instantly
flooded with images. So many images of women of different races,
shapes and ages. There had to be thousands of them, each in varying
stages of undress or in the sexual act. The link in this chain of
seemingly endless women was Shadrach. He ardently, skilfully and
ravenously copulated with them, his sexual appetite insatiable,
leaving them crying out from the force of their orgasms. After it
was done, when he had ascended that peak, the fall back was always
a brutal one. He always felt the same, whether he was on his feet,
his back or lying on whichever woman lay quivering against him. All
he felt was the emptiness that had consumed his soul, the
meaninglessness of his existence a painful shock sending him
searching for the next conquest, and that ride toward the peak that
always preceded such a brutal fall.

Beneath all those images
was a memory of a short, plump woman whose face was similar to his
but held a kindness and warmth his lacked. In one image her face
loomed over his. Then he was up in the air in her arms as she swung
him around, his laughter spilling from him in childish gurgles. I
saw her again with her face drawn, dark circles under her eyes as
she tucked a blanket around him in the back seat of a car where
they would be spending the night. There was another image of a
woman with long braids. She lay in a hospital bed, exhausted, her
face greasy with sweat. A baby squealed at her chest. She looked up
at Shadrach with love in her eyes when he picked up the baby and
cradled it in his arms. Another fleeting one was of them together
in the park on a brilliant sunlit afternoon. He sat on a bench
lazily drinking a can of Coke as he watched the little boy clamber
up and then down a slide.

All those images were
eclipsed by a small, thin man with eager eyes and a greedy smile.
The one who turned him into a vampire, emptying his life of the
people he loved. Effectively casting him into the void he was in
now for all eternity.

He pulled his wrist away
from my mouth. “That should be enough.”

I felt better. My limbs
sang with strength. My vision had cleared and I saw I was lying on
a beat-up sofa in a room with peeling wallpaper and shabby, stained
furniture. Shadrach stood up, looming over me. He wiped the blood
from his wrist and then stood watching the inch-long gash on his
wrist knit itself closed, his expression a strange mixture of
boredom and loathing.

“
I... You...” I tried to
glower at him, but felt too peculiar with that blood invading every
inch of me.

“
Oh, you didn’t think I
was going to kill you just now, did you?”

The most I could manage
was a withering look. Amusement curled around his lips, but there
was still that enmity in his eyes, turning them into windows that
looked in on darkness.

“
I told you, I like you,
Dallas. But I couldn’t resist scaring you a little. I wish you
could have seen your face when you thought you were about to
die.”

I tried to talk, but found
I couldn’t speak. My skin, muscles and bones felt hot. They
tightened painfully and I had to hold back a gasp.

“
I probably should have
warned you about this part,” he said when it began to feel like
molten lava was pouring through my limbs. His face was deadly
serious now, those dark windows steady as he stared down at me.
“It’s excruciating isn’t it? Maryse was like that for days.
Hopefully it won’t be the same for you. You know I’ve heard stories
of people who, for some reason or other, aren’t able to complete
the change. Their bodies harden, leaving them immobile and they are
stuck that way for all eternity. All they’re able to do is scream.
That’s quite a scary thought, isn’t it, my dear?”

He paused whilst I curled
into the fetal position. A scream was lodged in my throat, but all
I could do was gasp painfully whilst the pain
intensified.

“
I’m bored, I’ll be back
in a little while.” He walked to the door and then turned to face
me again. “Then again, I may not feel like coming back.”

I tried to speak, to tell
him to stop, but he had vanished.

Alone, I was finally able
to let the scream that had been building escape my lips. I screamed
and screamed against the musty smelling sofa as pain, the potency
of liquid flame, streaked through me shredding my flesh with
needles of fire. I howled into the gloomy room. There was no one to
hear my cries, for Shadrach was long gone.

Mercifully I was only able
to endure the pain for a short while, which felt like an eternity,
before blackness swooped in again.

***

When I awoke I was not
sure whether night had segued into day, for the room was awash with
an ethereal light that seemed to emanate from the shack itself. The
peeling wallpaper was awash with it, as was the stained furniture.
Even the windows coated with grime seemed to emit a silvery
luminescence lighting the room in a gentle, eerie radiance. The
open door was a rectangle of blinding argent.

My ears thrummed with
sound. Creaking that seemed to come from within the shack, the
heavy sigh of the wind outside and a sound I couldn’t identify that
was like millions of things prickling somewhere out there in the
vast night. I even thought I heard the gush of water from somewhere
far away, but I could not be sure. The damp, musty smell in the
room seemed to have intensified and beneath it was a multitude of
other scents I could not identify. My attention was torn away from
the sight, sounds and smells around me by an ache in my bones, a
dull ache that seemed to smoulder through to every inch of me.
Focusing on the ache seemed to make the sounds, smells—and even the
light in the room—dim.

I felt a shiver of
excitement when I realised what all of this meant. I rose to my
feet, my movements quick and fluid as if my body were a slip of
fabric caught in a light breeze. I faced the sofa I had been lying
on and placed a finger beneath one of the armrests. Using no force
whatever, I lifted it easily as if it were a sheet of paper. Still
using just a finger, I threw it against the wall. The boom of the
sofa hitting the wall was at first painful to my sensitive new
hearing, but I was immediately able to control it as I had been
able to control everything else I could hear.

“
Oh, hell
yeah!”

That was when I found
myself drawn to a noise outside: A heartbeat.

Shadrach. That bastard
hadn’t gone anywhere. He had been here all along.

And weren’t vampires
supposed to be dead? So how could his heart still be beating? How
was
my
heart
still beating come to think of it?

“
I was told vampire blood
is what keeps our dead flesh animated. Our hearts keep that blood
circulating, keeping us alive.”

I turned around to see him
standing in the doorway, a small smile on his lips as he appraised
me.

“
My, you make a beautiful
vampire.”

“
You creep!” I said. “How
could you scare me like that?”

He moved to the sofa and
set it right.

“
You should lie down. It
can take a few minutes to get used to the changes that have taken
place. You’re also still quite weak.”

He was right. I didn’t
exactly feel weak, but the ache in my bones was making me tremble
slightly. I did as he asked and he knelt beside the sofa, pulling
out a blanket that smelled almost as bad as the room. He wrapped it
around me and stroked my cheek.

“
Rest for a while,
Dallas.”