Silence: Part Two of Echoes & Silence (20 page)

Julia:

Curly hair, denim jacket, and thick blue powder smothered on both eyelids. I attended a rock concert tonight. This music has been growing on me for some time, and I felt a new kind of exhilaration to see the artists perform it live. However, what I felt among the sweaty pile of bodies, gathered into one space, was an entirely different matter.

The mass seemed to move like one unit, rising and falling in waves. I was pushed about and knocked aside more than once, and the stench was as unbearable as a rotting human. I turned to leave—to watch from the sidelines. And then Julia landed in a pathetic heap at my feet. I helped her up, because it was clear that either no one else noticed her being crushed there under their own feet, or they didn’t care. Looking around, I realised it was the latter; couples kissed, practically fornicating right there—in public, as casually as if it were a Sunday conversation outside church.

How times have changed.

I pulled the girl close, and when I bit her it was without the lure of lust or any care. She screamed, but it blended with the raucous cheers as the band came on stage again.

Julia was my saltiest victim—the sweat and makeup souring the taste of her blood—while the exhilaration of murder in the public eye heightened my senses and turned me on in a way nothing ever has.

I dropped her lifeless body to the floor and turned away.

Others saw the blood and thought nothing of it. Nothing. I left the stadium and sat atop the scaffolding above the stage, watching as her friends later discovered her—half trampled by the crowd.

The story was in the paper this morning. I know this because my uncle found it rather amusing to startle me by slamming the front page down on the table where I was enjoying my morning coffee. I was berated for failing to cover up a kill—warned that it would be my last mistake. If I were to act so carelessly again, he would strip me of my position on the council and see that I am imprisoned.

I laughed him off at the time, but it was clear that he was serious. Julia, although she was my most exhilarating kill, would be the last of her kind.

There was a section missing from the journal; halfway through it switched suddenly to nineteen-ninety-six. I flipped through the pages a few times to make sure I hadn’t missed it accidentally, but it was clear I wasn’t the one that missed something.

The nineties started with a girl named Georgia:

I always enjoy torture. I’m good at it. Made for it. Have the stomach for it, so they say. But Georgia is the first human I have ever tortured.

I know the limits of Vampire Law. It allows us to scare the humans, hurt them, make them cry, so long as we kill them after. But even then there are a list of things we cannot do. Under any circumstances. And while I find myself to be somewhat of a perverted man, there are some things even I will not condone. Not on a human. Yet.

After Georgia, I am now aware that this could change.

Lucky for her, I wasn’t willing to risk my position on the council for the sake of seeing that mouthy little whore die in agony.

My two years leave is up today, and had she kept her mouth shut as I said my farewells, she would have been left alive.

If there was ever born a girl more stupid than that blonde cheerleader, I have not yet met her.

Perhaps I should have restrained. Perhaps taking her virginity all those months ago and leaving her bound to me was my own undoing. She demanded I stay, love her. Threatened me if I refused. Stupid girl. I will not be told what to do. Not by a girl.

I brought her here and led her to the cellar. She didn’t ask any questions as I strung her arms up above her head. She opened her mouth willingly as I gagged her with her own underwear. She pressed her breasts into my dagger as I traced a line between them with the tip.

It may be possible this girl was as twisted as I.

I had no intention of cutting her, but she clearly believed I did, and the fear she felt made her hot in places that surprised me. She wanted to be cut. She wanted to be hurt.

I shoved my fingers into her wet genitals and pulled the flaps apart, driving almost my entire hand inside her. She didn’t scream. Didn’t cry; her head went back and she closed her eyes, moaning. At this point I was confused, not sure if her desire to be tortured turned me on or perhaps off. All that I loved about torture leaned perversely to the side of remonstrated harm—the screams, the pleas. The cries. If she was begging me to hurt her, how could I possibly enjoy it?

Then, the idea of pain and sex tainted my thoughts. I’d heard of this before—heard rumours of submissive women that enjoyed being tied up, slapped, cut even. Among other things. Until now I had never encountered one. Until now I never thought torture and sex could go hand-in-hand. And now I couldn’t understand why I’d never placed the two together before.

I slapped her around a bit; pulled her hair, fucked her roughly—perhaps brutally. But her yearning for more—the vile and depraved thoughts—annoyed me. As I felt the animal inside me awaken—felt it fall in love with torture and sex—something about her willingness to participate made my dick soft.

I stood there staring at her for a moment, feeling a desire to perform an act that once induced my own nightmares.

Did I want to do to her what I witnessed happen in the cells when I was a child? Had it twisted my mind in some irreparable way?

Those thoughts angered me. Angered me enough that I was perhaps a little unkind after that. I would not be made into a greater monster than I already was by the whim of a stupid human girl. She did this to me. She drew this side of me out with her sadistic ways.

Even now, hours after her death, I know not the kind of man I am. Even now I can feel that monster alive in me.

Truth be told, I kill without consent. I commit the most deadly sin every day without consent. I am starting to wonder how sex is any different.

I do not want to be this way.

“I warned you,” Drake said, snapping me back from the sound of David’s voice in my head.

I quickly wiped the tears from my cheeks and closed the journal.

“Those journals were hidden for a reason.” Drake sat down beside me so casually he reminded me of a high school boy.

“Yeah, because he’s… so goddamn sick.”

“
Was
,” Drake corrected.

I just shook my head, looking away.

“This is the David you changed.” He tapped the book. “The David I miss.”

“Well, I don’t ever want to see that David surface.” I shoved the book aside carelessly and dusted myself off as though the evil might be catchy. “No wonder he’d never show me the ‘real’ him—the vampire. He was probably afraid he’d rape me!”

“Precisely. And that is why you love him.”

“Huh?” I screwed my nose up.

“You know that the reason he would not show you his monster is because he was afraid of what he might do.”

“What’s your point?”

“He’s not all that evil if he feared the monster himself.”

“No,” I said with certainty. “He’s worse than evil, Drake.”

“That’s a very cold observation, my dear.”

Yes. It was cold. Especially since I knew David better than that. I knew what kind of man he was. And while maybe he thought about raping that girl, that was an intensely personal confession in his own journal. I knew also that if I was to read a little further down, I would probably see him have a moment of clarity where he realised it just wasn’t in him. “That girl I just read about—Georgia, are they her bones in his cellar?”

“One of many, I would say.”

“Why would he do that—here, I mean? He knew it was against the law. I thought David was all about the law.”

Drake sat back and smiled. “For the sake of bringing my beloved Anandene into this world, I looked the other way on many occasions when I should have had him arrested and locked up. It is safe to say, perhaps, that one of my best councilmen was also my greatest criminal.”

“David the lawbreaker, huh?”

“He never was one to practice what he preached. Not until the very end of the nineties. And then it all changed.”

“How so?”

“That is when the driven and headstrong upholder of law surfaced and he became the man many vampires feared and admired.”

“What changed? Why the nineties?”

“He just grew up, I imagine.”

“It took him over a hundred years to grow up?”

Drake laughed, then he reached across my lap and took the unmarked journal from the top of the pile. After flipping through a few pages, he nodded to himself and handed it to me—open toward the back of the book. “Today you’ve read the deep and unguarded thoughts of a vampire, Amara. It would be a very safe bet that my own journal would read in much the same manner. But perhaps this will restore your faith in the man you love.”

I snorted at him, about to ask how that was possible, but he got up and walked away.

When I looked at the page and saw the word “Emily”, I knew that I’d just jumped many years into the future. I knew this was the Emily we both loved.

Emily was supposed to die today, but luck was on her side, and perhaps mine. She just happened to mention in passing that she’d told her mother who she was studying with this afternoon.

Stupid little bitch. I should have killed her right there.

Instead, I took the one thing from her she can never get back—binding her to me eternally.

Delicate little thing. Fucks like a starfish, though, and cried after. But she was tight and wet and more willing than any girl I’ve had. And maybe just a little more irritating than others as well.

I’d already seen this part of their story firsthand—through David’s memories. I didn’t need to read it again. And still, reflecting on it took my mind back to when I first met him at school and then to so many times we shared Emily’s company. All along, she was desperately in love with him and didn’t really understand why. All that time he knew the feel of her naked body against his—the way her skin responded to his touch, and he put those hands on
me
.

I went forward a few pages in search of this man I loved.

I was planning to let the girl live. But she is so downright irritating that I nearly sliced her throat while we studied. Had I done it, I would be forced to leave this town and I am not yet ready to move on. Something about this place feels… like home, in a way, as if there’s a connection here that is calling to me. I felt it as I raised my hand to strike her. I felt it as I plotted out my every move from impact to her death. And I felt it even stronger as I lowered my hand and instead touched her face softly.

Emily Pierce escaped death again this afternoon, and if she could mind her tongue long enough for my temper to simmer, she may just live another day.

When I fucked her last night I made sure I hurt her. She was clearly scared as I bound her hands. She begged me not to as I parted her legs and tied her feet to the bed. But she did not deny me when I entered her. This girl trusts me, and yet I am the monster she should fear. I mean to kill her. I want to kill her. Not for the blood or the nourishment, but for the sport. The desire.

She is the first girl I’ve bedded that ever cried that way after spending the night with me. And I felt not an ounce of pity. I just wanted to kill her where she lay—naked and sobbing under me.

But my uncle’s voice pierced my thoughts and forced me to spare her again: we do not kill in our own beds.

It was rather amusing to watch, though. I studied her carefully, stroking her hair, wiping her tears, and decided then that there’d be more pleasure in allowing her to live anyway—in agony.

I cast her from my chamber, tossing her clothes into the corridor, then slammed the door shut and went to sleep. I will erase it from her later. For today, she can suffer.

These pages were bringing me awfully close to the David I met, and I hadn’t yet seen a moment of clarity or great change. My skin crawled so tightly—so sickened by each paragraph I read—that it nearly crept off my arms.

A few pages on I saw Jason mentioned, so I stopped to read that entry. Something about David and Jason’s relationship pre-me intrigued me.

The fool has no idea. Emily is not in love with him. He is dreaming. He is trying to relive his days with Rochelle, because Emily resembles her. Little does he know, Emily is bound to me. She is transferring that confusion onto my likeness. If it did not entertain me so much to watch him fall for something he will never have, I would warn him. But the pleasure of fucking with his head is just too explicit a feeling to end prematurely.

When he is forced to move on for winter, I will go back to fucking Emily. I’ll comfort her in her grief, and then I’ll fuck her—make her long for the sweet and gentle nature of my brother. And when she cries for the way I’ve treated her, I will film it and send my brother a copy of the tape. He will be powerless to do anything but watch as this girl is endlessly tortured by her love for me and my hatred and disrespect for her.