Snow White Blood Red (4 page)

However, that was not all.

After dinner, I couldn’t take my eyes off their nine-year-old prince. Such a beauty, the boy was. He was well mannered and shook my hand in such delicacy I have never seen before, but he seemed bored by the presence of the elders like us. His beautiful eyes were scanning the castle for the princess.

I asked my husband to summon our daughter and introduce her to the prince, hoping that cupid will strike his arrow and bind their hearts with velvet threads of love forever. Who else could I think of being my daughter’s husband in many years to come?

As our loyal servant escorted my lovely Snow White down the stairs, her black hair waved down her back on the white dress she wore. She looked paler today than usual – the sun had become her worst enemy lately and she wouldn’t go out in the light. Her room was darkened with the curtains rolled down over the windows, but she was still looking fabulous like a princess, licking her blood-red lips once she laid her eyes on the beautiful prince. It was appetite at first sight.

The prince seemed to cherish her as well. When the prince and princess’s eyes met, all elders exchanged murmurs and started gossiping about how beautiful they were. The sun splayed through the curtains and suddenly Snow White didn’t mind the sunlight in the prince’s presence. They played together and he chased her across the castle but Shew was deceivingly smart in hiding and manipulating, always with that doe-eyed smile on her face.

My eyes followed them everywhere they went in the castle. I was worried, for the prince was one of the boys with an infinite appetite for girls. However young the Reds were, their men had a reputation of growing up and becoming womanizers, but they also had a reputation for being irresistible to women. Shew had grown with an uncanny appetite of beautiful boys at such age. I could see it in her eyes whenever she met one.

What I feared was about to happen eventually. I caught the prince pushing Snow White gently to a corner and God only knows what that beautifully mischievous nine-year-old had in mind.

As I parted them, my husband summoned for one of his favorite young huntsmen, about Snow White’s age. The king had a habit of training young boys he trusted to become huntsmen and later help him defend the kingdom against the demons lurking outside the kingdom. The young boy huntsman was to escort the prince and the princes so nothing crazy happened.

Then the crowd was waiting for us outside to celebrate and bring joy onto the day the two kingdoms became alliances – and maybe more than that in the future. We, the elders, approached the people, heading out to the balcony when we heard a sudden scream behind us.

I tuned back, my heart racing, praying that it wasn’t what I feared. I was too late.

The young prince was lying on the floor, shuddering helplessly as if possessed by demonic spirits, like a fish throbbing for breath out of water. His eyes were all white as he screamed in pain. I could spot the two bitemarks on his neck and his blood trickling down onto the white and black marble floor.

I looked for the huntsman but he was gone.

Titling my head, I saw her, my daughter, Snow White, standing in the middle of the castle hall with blood dripping from her lips, but still looking as innocent as a white dove, as if she just overdosed on red cherry-flavored ice cream – we didn’t have that in the 18
^th
century but you get what I mean.

As we ran toward the prince, she seemed astonished at the prince’s fainting, wondering why he didn’t like her biting him, why her bite hurt him as if she thought of it like a kiss or something. And I though the prince was a danger to her. She looked at me with her fangs drawn out, but with those doe eyes, pleading as if she were the victim not the predator.

“What happened to him?” She wondered as my husband used his magic powers to erase the king and queen’s memory so they forget what happened. He was such a master at the dark arts, but used wisely.

“Take her away from here,” he growled as he held the boy and laid him on a table. “I know how to save him.” He locked himself alone with the boy in the room for he didn’t want anyone, even me, to see how he will resurrect the prince.

I pulled my daughter away, up the stairs, to wash her face and her blood-dripping dress. She licked the prince’s blood form her hands like tasting melted chocolate from the palm of your hands.

“You can’t do that,” I yelled.

I wasn’t surprised. I knew what she was long ago but I needed the right moment to see her change with my own eyes. Still, my love for her chained me and stopped me from taunting her properly. It is as if I were teaching her the etiquettes of how not to drop a plate or a spoon while she ate.

“I can’t do what?” She sounded confused, still licking her lips.

“You can’t just bite anyone you want to.” I gritted my teeth.

“But he is so yummy, mother,” She said. “So yummy. Didn’t you see how cute he is?”

I rolled my eyes and omitted a smile. That must have been the demonic part in me that wanted to smile at my daughter biting a boy she thinks is yummy. Don’t we all girlies like to do that from time to time?

I allowed reason to win over and managed to knot my face. “Still. That’s no excuse, Shew.”

“Why?”

“You just can’t. There are some rules that girls should follow without asking.”

“But I want more,” She stomped her feet stubbornly as that tint of gold gleamed in her eyes again. She did not understand the darkness she possessed inside her. Her darkness was spontaneous and childish. But for how long would she stay only a beautiful monster before the cocoon her darkness is wrapped inside will give up and split open?

“More. More. More.” She repeated.

“Stop it.” I lost control and screamed at her face to face.

That’s when the light in her face dimmed …

She bowed her head down, looking at the floor as I could feel her body heating up in my hands. I think I heard a growl somewhere inside of her. I could only see her forehead wrinkling tightly behind strands of black hair as her skin died slowly into a paler color. Letting go of her hands, I swallowed my shriek so she does not sense my fear. Whatever disease or curse possessed her, I couldn’t allow myself to lose control and sovereignty over her. I am her mother, and I am the Queen of Sorrow.

It was this very moment when I first noticed that we have become rivals, not mother and daughter.

“I know what this is all about.” She sighed in a lower tone, still not looking at me.

My heart raced, as I was afraid that when she raises her head up again, I would see those golden, yet scary, eyes of her again. I was afraid they would be blackened by sorrow like her grandfather. I was alone with her in the second floor of the castle, regretting that I didn’t keep closer to my husband. What will become of her now? What will become of me?

I doubt that she will only want to suck on my thumb this time.

“Did you hear me, mother?” She repeated with her head down.

“I did, darling.” I said reluctantly, trying to fake being confident “Wh-h-at is this about?”

Eventually, she raised her head …

“I think the prince doesn’t like me.” She said with her blue eyes filled with unborn tears.

There were no fangs or golden eyes to be seen. She was just a seven-year-old girl with blood dripping from her lips, experiencing rejection for the first time in her short life span. I was too confused and overwhelmed to explain to her that the prince, almost dying from her bite, wasn’t rejecting her. That you don’t bite some yummy boy and expect him to giggle and jump the rope for you.

“It’s not that he didn’t like you,” I said, holding her in my arms again, letting her smear hear bloody lips onto my royal dress. “It’s—“

“Then what is it?” She sobbed in my arms. Her skin was cold as ice.

“It’s just that you don’t bite someone you like so soon,” I made up a lie. “Things don’t happen that way, Shew. You need to spend a lot of time together first. Get to know each other, and make sure that he will want you to bite him by then.”

“Really?” She gazed happily into my eyes. “Can I try again, then? I promise I’ll let him spend all the time he wants with me first.”

That night, I washed her then tucked her to bed, reciting that story about the sleeping beauty kissed awake by the prince. As her eyes closed, I wondered if Sleeping Beauty bit the prince after he kissed her. Maybe the prince’s kiss wasn’t a kiss. Maybe it was a bite.

In the following years, we managed to keep her away from other children since she was attracted to biting those who were her age. Especially, the yummy ones.

My husband sent for doctors, sailing over from Germany, Transylvania, and Italy to solve the mystery and cure her disease or curse as discreetly as possible. None of them had a solution, even the famous Dutch doctor Frederich Van Helsing. She bit a couple of them.

It was the end the 18
^th
century and Snow White’s curse seemed to spread everywhere. People were turning into what the locals called vampires all the time, and were hunted and killed however young their age. They ripped out their heart after staking them for it was rumored the heart was the center of the disease. It was called the vampire craze, a historical event that the Brothers Grimm couldn’t forge since it was documented by other historians, starting from Europe and spreading overseas to the Kingdom of Sorrow.

We couldn’t risk anyone knowing about her so we locked her in the castle, waiting until she reaches the age of sixteen. A gypsy healer told us that this was when she would heal, that her soul would weighs exactly 21 grams when she is sixteen. The weight of the soul was measured in a mysterious way that I didn’t know of, but it the soul weight was part of the weight of the heart and could be only measured by weighing the heart with some ancient instrument that I have never heard of before. No heart can be cured before it grows big enough to hold a soul that weighs 21 grams inside it. Snow White’s heart when she becomes sixteen years old.

One night, when she was eight, she came to my room late at night while my husband was out in the battlefields.

“Shew?” I asked.

She didn’t reply, approaching me in the dark as if she were sleepwalking, and stopping by bed. Her face glittered beneath the candle light. I saw that tint of gold in them again like golden fireflies shimmering in the dark.

She didn’t talk. She just pulled my hand from under the sheets and sucked on my thumb after pricking it with the edge of her fangs. She only drank a couple of drops and smiled at me with her now-not chubby cheeks. She looked incredibly lively and more beautiful after she did. My daughter was beautiful monster.

It was not in her intentions to hurt me. She did love me as much as I did.

“Mom?” She wondered as she tucked herself under the sheets and hugged me. To tell the truth, she didn’t say
mom
. She addressed me by my real name, which I prefer to keep for myself for now. I don’t think you can understand if I told who I really am. “Do you remember the day I was born?” she asked.

I wondered why she asked because I do remember it clearly like looking into a pure crystal ball. It was a strange day. A very strange day.

“Do
you
?” I wondered, running my hand through her hair.

“No. But I have these dreams where I am someone really important in this world like my father, a fearless warrior. I have to choose between saving the world,” She stopped for a second. “Or destroying the world.”

Then she went to sleep.

***

Now in the cottage, I stopped telling my story at this point and looked at Jacob Grimm’s dead body.

“That’s enough for a Deadtime story,” I whispered to him and rolled his eyes shut with my hands. I placed two mirror coins onto them to block his eyes from looking into the Dreamworld from the afterlife. “Still you’d wonder about me, right? If I was so tender and she was the monster, how did I become what I am now?” I let out a painful laugh. “Well, that’s a long story, Jacob. I will write this in my diary tonight and when the time comes, I will be able to write it in the Grimm Diaries. 2012 is coming to a close and the war of altering the tales will start again.”