Tales of the Otherworld (2 page)

He went to lie back down when his knees knocked the board again, this time sending it clattering to the floor. The figure in the chair jumped up, her hood falling back, and he saw a dark-haired woman, gracefully sliding into middle age—his mother.

“Aaron!”

She rushed to him, hands grabbing his shoulders, fingers digging in. Her face loomed over his—blotchy with tears, eyes swollen, hair bedraggled.

“Say something,” she whispered. “Please.”

“I drank too much. Again.”

Her arms flew around him, head going to his chest, burrowing in, shoulders convulsing in a silent sob.

“I prayed it would be you,” she whispered. “I know it’s not right for a mother to have favorites, but I always hoped that if God chose one of my children for the blessing, I hoped it would be you. And then after …” She hiccuped a sob. “I prayed, Aaron. I
prayed
you’d be the one.”

“What one?” He pulled back to look at her. “I really think I drank too much. Maybe if I go back to sleep—”

He tried to lie down, but her fingers dug into his shoulders.

“No! There’s no time. Your father wants to seal the coffin. It’s been three days. It must be sealed.”

“Seal? Coffin?” Aaron looked down. “I’m sleeping in a coffin?”

His mother took his hand and pressed it to a spot above her breast. “What do you feel, Aaron?”

His fingers almost trembled with the beat of her racing heart. Before he could answer, she moved the fingers to his own breast…and they went still.

“Now what do you feel?”

“Noth— Bloody hell!” He jumped, almost tumbling back into the coffin. “What—”

“You’re
alive.
A different kind of life, Aaron, but you are alive, and that’s all that matters.”

“All that—? I’m not breathing! I don’t have a—”

“You died, and you’ve been born again. It’s a gift of my blood, told to each woman before she weds. Every generation, only a few are blessed. They die, and return to live again…to live and live, and nothing can kill them. A blessing beyond measure.”

“So I’m alive?” He chewed his lip, then nodded. “All right. But what do we tell Father?”

Her gaze dropped. “We can’t tell him, Aaron. You can’t ever see him again.” She hugged him again. “I’m so sorry, but he wouldn’t understand. What you are…they have a name for it. They do not understand it.”

“What am I?” he asked slowly.

When his mother didn’t answer, he reached up, wrapped his hands around her upper arms, and pulled her away from him, his gaze going to hers.

“Mother, what am I?”

She wouldn’t look him in the eye. “They call it a…a vampire, Aaron, but they don’t understand—”

“A
vampire
?”

“It is not what they think, Aaron. You are not some soulless demon. You are still my son—still as good and as God-fearing a man as you ever were.”

He forced her chin up, to meet her eyes. “And the blood-taking, Mother? Is that a lie, too?”

“You must feed, yes. On human blood. But it is only feeding, like taking milk from a cow or eggs from a hen. You’ll do no harm.”

“So I don’t need to kill?”

A long hesitation before she hurried on, words tumbling out, almost incomprehensible. “Only once a year, before the anniversary of your death.”

“And if I do not?”

Her gaze met his then, eyes blazing. “You must, Aaron. You must!”

“Kill another person to prolong my own life?”

She hesitated again, and the struggle in her eyes sliced him to the core—the conscience of a moral woman at battle with the ferocious instinct of a mother.

“You can make careful choices,” she said softly. “Find those who are dying, and relieve them of their suffering. It is only once a year,
Aaron. There are people—many people—who are not long for this earth. Take their lives and do some good with it. Honor God in that way, and he will understand.”

God?
Aaron bit back the word before it flew from his mouth. He suspected God had very little to do with this “blessing,” but if his mother had convinced herself that it was so, then he would not destroy her faith by questioning the origin of this taint in her blood. And, as he sat there, holding her, listening to her cry, he knew he would not destroy her hope either. He’d been a loving, loyal son in life, and so he would be in this nonlife.

She said he couldn’t see his father, which meant she’d expect him to leave. If he were to decide his new life lay in the New World before the year was up, she would understand.

He had a year. A year of feeding on the blood of men. But if she was right, and it did them no harm, he could stomach that. He would visit her, and feign contentment for her, and before the year was up, he would leave and let her believe he was still walking this earth, somewhere. That much he could do for her.

Aaron slunk through the alley looking for passed-out drunks.
Like a stray dog rooting for scraps in the trash.
He’d been a vampire for nearly a month now, and it wasn’t getting any easier. Instinct showed him how to feed, but he despised every second of it.

It didn’t seem to have much effect on the humans—his mother had been right about that. Yet skulking through alleys like a scavenger, preying on the weak…It made his stomach churn. Or it would, if his stomach could still churn. The only thing his gut did these days was complain when he wasn’t paying it enough attention.

As a human, he’d always been able to skip a meal or two during harvest, to work from dawn until dusk and eat when he had time. But now he was at the mercy of his appetite. If he was but an hour or two late, his whole body revolted, turning sluggish and slow, leaving him stumbling through back roads looking for food.

As he walked, a cry came from the dark end of an adjoining alley. He went still, the old urge taking over, homing in on the sound like a cow hearing the bawl of her calf.
Though these days, it was more like a hawk hearing
the squeal of a mouse
, he thought. From savior to predator. A blessing indeed. He kicked a stone into the wall and watched a rat scurry off. Then the cry came again. His head lifted, the old instinct refusing to buckle under the new order.

He stopped in midstep and tilted his head. And why should it buckle? Was he not impervious to harm? So his mother had claimed. Perhaps the time had come to test that. What was the worst that could happen? He’d get another blade between the ribs and be free. But if he couldn’t die, then there was nothing to keep him from doing the same thing he would have done a month ago…and, this time, claim a blood bounty from the would-be predator.

The thug snarled something to the woman in his grasp, and Aaron’s lips parted, canines lengthening. He ran his tongue over them. This was one meal he wouldn’t mind taking.

Six months later, Aaron slid along the darkened road, his feet making no sound. He’d learned that his new body came custom-made for hunting. Ahead of him swaggered a man.
Proud of yourself, aren’t you
, Aaron thought.
It takes a brave man to beat a whore.

The world was full of predators. If you knew where to look, you could find one any day of the week, and with very little effort. Aaron no longer worried about the effects of his blood-taking. If one of his victims suffered a bruised neck or a day or two of weakness, he wouldn’t feel guilty. It was a world of difference from slinking through alleys. He had his power back, and his pride.

His mother had noticed the change almost immediately.

“See,” she said, when he visited her. “You are adjusting. You are
living.
”

And he would continue to live, for another half-year. He’d already begun hinting about traveling to the New World, and his mother was pleased, seeing this as a sign that he was planning for his future.

A couple rounded the corner and headed Aaron’s way, and his bearing changed, shoulders lifting, stride shortening, the smooth glide vanishing. A friendly smile and tip of his head as the couple passed. He walked another half-dozen steps, glanced over his shoulder at them, then swung his gaze around, slow and careful. When he was certain he was alone, the predator returned.

As Aaron drew close enough to hear the clomp of the man’s boots, his fangs began to extend. An automatic reaction, like salivating. He forced himself to think of something else—of where he’d spend the night—and the canines retracted.

When his quarry hit a T-intersection at the end of the lane, Aaron closed his eyes to test yet another developing skill. He counted to twenty, then looked. The man was gone.
He turned left
, his gut said. He hurried to the crossroad and looked each way. There, ten yards to the left, was the man.

Aaron smiled. It’d been weeks since he’d guessed wrong. He hadn’t figured out how he could track people. It seemed like a sixth sense, being able to “feel” a presence, as if the pulse of life were vibrating through the air. Lately he’d even begun to be able to separate presences, and could track a target through a small group.

As he drew closer to his quarry, he slid into the shadows. No real need to hide. He was, after all, impervious to harm. Still, there was no sense in calling attention to himself. A slow glide through the shadows, then, once he was close enough to smell the man’s unwashed body, he’d swoop out and snatch him up, and his victim would be unconscious before he was even sure he’d been attacked.
Like a hawk diving for a mouse.

Something whispered behind him. Aaron swung around and focused on the sound with a speed and precision that still astounded him. Yet no one was there. He didn’t need his eyes and ears to tell him that. He sensed it—or, more accurately,
failed
to sense anyone.

He replayed the sound in his mind. The whisper of leaves? The rustle of blowing paper? Both logical explanations…except that he’d been plagued by these odd noises behind him for days now. Aaron took a harder look around. Every sense told him there was no living being there, and yet …

He shook off his unease and loped off to catch up with his dinner.

Aaron took one last gulp of blood, shivering as the heat of it streamed down his throat. Then, with more reluctance than he cared to admit, he ran his tongue over the puncture wounds to stop the blood flow. He lifted his head and eased back on his haunches.

“You can take more than that.”

Aaron whirled. There, less than a foot away, stood a woman, one who gave off no sense of life; who had slipped up on him as quietly as a phantom. Her dark green woolen cloak blended into the shadows, only accentuating her copper red hair and pale skin. Under the cloak, Aaron caught a glimpse of a dress as finely made as the cloak, spun from the kind of cloud-soft wool he’d only ever seen in shops.

She wasn’t beautiful, and she had to be almost as old as his mother, but there was something about her that dared him to look away. Maybe the piercing stare of her green eyes or the arrogant tilt to her sharp chin or the bemused smile on her lips—or maybe it was all of those things, challenging his brain to figure out what the combination meant.

“You can take more than that,” she said again. When he only stared, she arched her brows. “Well?”

“You’re a vampire,” he said slowly.

A slight roll of her eyes. “I should hope so. Do you have many humans popping ’round to give you pointers on blood-taking?”

“You’ve been following me.”

A graceful shrug of her shoulders. “Curiosity. The curse of our race. Live long enough, and anything new tickles your fancy. And you certainly are new. Hereditary, I presume?”

When his brows knitted, she said, “Vampirism is in your bloodline?”

“Is there any other way?”

“Yes, but you don’t strike me as the kind of young man who would choose such a thing.”

His lip curled. “Who
would
choose such a thing?”

Another elegant shrug, then she waved at the unconscious man. “You can feed more without killing him. Quite a bit more. It’s easier that way, so you don’t need to hunt every night.” Her gaze met his. “Unless you like to hunt every night?”

When he didn’t answer, she continued. “Whether one enjoys the hunt or not, nightly can be taxing and inconvenient. Continue feeding, then, and I will—”

“I don’t want to kill him.”

An exasperated sigh. “May I finish? I was about to say that I will show you how to stop before you pose any danger to his life.” An arch of the brows. “Acceptable?”

He nodded, but did nothing.

Her lips twisted in a smile. “Here, let me turn my back and give you some privacy.”

He waited until she’d turned around, then repositioned himself on the other side of the man so he could see her while feeding. Several times he stopped drinking, not trusting her to tell him when to cease. With exasperated patience, she had him continually check the man’s pulse. When it finally fluttered, she told him to stop.

He closed his eyes, and luxuriated in the warm heaviness of a full stomach.

“Better?” she said.

He opened his eyes to see her watching him. He blinked, forced his fangs to retract, and got to his feet.

“I can teach you more,” she said, voice almost a purr.

“Thank you, but no. I don’t—won’t—need it.”

He expected her to press for an explanation, but she just studied him, then nodded—that same infuriating half-smile on her lips.

“You don’t intend to make your first kill,” she said. “That would be quite a waste, don’t you think?”

He didn’t answer.

“Well, perhaps then, if you are in your final months, you could use some companionship. It’s difficult talking to people now, always worrying that they’ll see what you are, never quite able to stop thinking about what
they
are.”

“I’d prefer to be left alone.”

A polite nod. “As you wish.”

With that, she walked away.

As the months passed, Aaron found himself thinking of the red-haired vampire. He’d be feeding and imagine her voice, telling him how to watch for signs that he’d drunk too much. Or he’d be darting through a busy market, always nervous about getting too close to humans, and he’d wonder if such caution was necessary. Could they see that he wasn’t breathing? Would they sense that his heart didn’t beat? She could have eased his anxieties with tips for blending into the human world.