The Purity of Blood: Volume I (26 page)

“Is your real
name Daniel Bennett?”

He didn’t move a
muscle except in his eyes.
 
I could see
them sink as the words left my lips.

“What would you
do if I said yes?”

I thought about
it for a moment.
 
To be honest, I hadn’t
thought that far ahead.
 

“I don’t
know.
 
Tell me and we’ll find out.”

“The answer is –
yes, it is.”

Now
I
wasn’t moving.
 
I actually forgot to breathe and stood there
stock still until I must have started to turn blue.
 
Perhaps sensing my distress, Daniel quickly
crossed the room to gently take my arm.

“I think you
need some air,” he murmured in my hair as he gestured towards the door in the
wall of glass.

I looked down at
his arm
under mine
only to stare at it.
 
Realizing I’d frozen by his side, he stopped
his movement, waiting to see if I was having an adverse reaction to his
touch.
 
After a moment, I looked into his
face.
 
He’d been watching me, waiting for
me to pull away, but I didn’t.
 
Maybe I’d
wanted to at first, but I couldn’t.
 
He
seemed lost somehow, like some small part of him was desperately trying to
cling to me like an anchor.
 
Gently, he
led me out onto the balcony and sat me down on a deck chair.
 
Not knowing how to feel or what to say, I
looked out over the lake while he sat down beside me.

“Why are you
still here?” he asked curiously, still with that same hint of sadness in his
voice.

“What do you
mean?”

“I mean any
person with an ounce of sense would have run screaming out that door and never
come back. – But you’re still here.
 
I
don’t understand.
 
You don’t even seem
frightened of me.”

“I’m not.”
 

“But you should
be.
 
I’m a frightening thing, Sara, and
you’ve seen it
first hand
.”
 
He shuddered as he said the words.

“Maybe I’m just
too stupid to know any better, but – I need to know.
 
Are you a …”

I stopped
midsentence, not sure if I could get the words past my lips.
 
I looked up at his face for my answer.
 
He was staring at me with pained eyes waiting
for me to say the word he obviously didn’t want to hear.

“A what?” he
finally asked.

But I knew I had
to say it, and forced it out of my mouth in a whisper.

“A vampire.”

He closed his
eyes for a moment then looked back out at the lake.
 
Then after a pause, he got up and walked over
to stand at the railing.
 
Without turning
around to face me, he said “Yes, I am.”

I felt like I’d
been punched in the gut, but punched in a way that had realigned my skewed
vision of the last month of my life.
 
Things seemed to align now making sense where before everything was a
jumble.
 

He slowly turned
to face me.
 
I wished he’d smile or even
look impassive.
 
Anything would be better
than the expression of anguish he now wore.

“You shouldn’t
be here, Sara.
 
We shouldn’t be this
close to each other.
 
It’s too
dangerous.
  
Even now I can tell that the
cut on your hand hasn’t healed over yet.
 
It was hard enough before, but now …”
 

I looked down at
the bandage I’d crudely wrapped around it.
 

“I don’t
understand.
 
You’re around people all
day, why would I be any different?”

“First of all,
I’m alone with
you
.
 
Second, you …”
 
He stopped and looked away for a moment.
 
I think he was embarrassed.
 
“You just smell so damn good.”
 
He looked like he was beating down a demon
inside that was trying to escape. “You have no idea what you are.”

“What am I?” I
asked confused.

“You’re what we
call a pure.”

“I’m
pure
?” I asked, more than a little taken
aback.

“It’s not what
it sounds like,” and he kind of rolled his eyes and smiled.
 
“It means you have pure blood, blood free of
genetic diseases or impurities.
 
Well,
not one hundred percent free, but as free as anyone I’ve ever encountered.
 
You have to understand that, the purer
someone’s blood is, the more alluring it is to us.”

“You’re telling
me I’m
alluring
?”
 
Again I was confused and stunned at the same
time.

“Intoxicating
really,” he said, with a bit of a haze around his eyes.
 
“I have to really concentrate just to be
around you, and your fresh cut isn’t helping any.”
 
Then he shook his head and snapped himself
out of his haze.
 
“I usually do my best
to avoid people such as yourself, but it’s impossible to avoid all of you.
 
You can’t tell a pure by what they look like
on the outside.
 
Sometimes by the time I
get close enough, it’s too late.”

“What happened
to you last night?”

“You saw what I
look like when I come close to losing control.
 
You don’t know how close you came to dying last night, Sara.”
 
But I think I did.
 
“Why did you do that?”

“Cut myself?”

He nodded.

I blushed,
suddenly embarrassed for some reason.
 

“It was the only
thing I could come up with.
 
I guess I’ve
had my suspicions for a while now.
 
After
you said goodbye last night, I couldn’t wait.
 
I needed to know the truth.
 
And I
knew whatever it was; you weren’t going to tell me voluntarily.
 
I came up with that as sort of an
experiment.
 
I wasn’t sure what I was
expecting to happen, but I needed to know.”

“It was a stupid
thing to do,” was all he said in reply, but I could tell he was a little pissed
at me.

After a minute,
I said “You haven’t asked me if I’m glad I know the truth.”

He looked up,
surprised by my statement.
 

“Well, are you?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Aren’t you
scared of me?
 
You really should be.”

I thought about
it for a moment.

“Yes, I should
be, but no, I’m not.
 
If you were going
to kill me, you’d have done it before now.”

“To be honest,
I’ve never told a human what I am before.
 
I’ve heard stories about how they’ve reacted from other … others like
me, and they all reacted badly.”

“I guess that’s
understandable.”

“But it makes it
all the more difficult for me to understand you.”

Did he want to understand me?

“I guess
subconsciously, I’d already decided that whatever the answer was; it was
already too late for it to matter.”

“I don’t
understand,” he said, as he sat down beside me again.

I didn’t
answer.
 
There just weren’t words.
 
I simply leaned my head against his shoulder
and took a deep breath.
 
He stiffened at
my touch, but after a few moments hesitation, he began to relax.
 

As a cool breeze
swept up from the lake below, we sat there looking over the water in silence,
each deep in our own thoughts.
 
Mine all
seemed to dwell on the question – so what happens now?
   

SARA

His
arm still around me holding me close, we sat on the deck in
silence until the late afternoon shadows crept across the waters of the lake
below us.
 

“You must be
getting cold,” he finally whispered in my ear.
 
I could feel his breath on me.

I was cold, but
hadn’t wanted to say anything.
 
I was so
comfortable under the arm he now had wrapped around my shoulder.
 
He’d slipped it around me, pulling me closer
to his side some time ago.
 
As I
reluctantly straightened up, his arm fell away.

“A little I
suppose.
 
What about you?” I asked.

He paused.
 
“No, not really. I … um … don’t get cold.”

I raised an
eyebrow his way as if to illicit more of an answer.

“Is that a
vampire thing?”

“Kind of.
 
Well, – yes.”

“You never get
cold?
 
Not ever?”

“It’s sort of
hard to describe.”
 

He stood up and
indicated for me to head inside.
 
As I
did, he followed behind me.
 

“I guess it’s
not that I don’t feel the cold, it just doesn’t bother me.
 
Neither does heat,” he added.
 
“I … um … don’t get tired or have to sleep
either.”
 

Suddenly he
looked uncomfortable and changed the subject.
 
“You’re hungry, I’ll fix you something to eat.”
  
With a smile over his shoulder, he walked
into the kitchen.

“How do you know
I’m hungry?” I asked, traipsing behind him.

He popped his
head out from around a kitchen cabinet.
 
“I should probably mention that I also have very good hearing.”
 
A sly smile played on his full lips.

As if on cue, my
stomach growled loudly.
 
I glanced up in
time to see one of his eye brow arch as he tried not to laugh.

Quickly looking
away, I blushed.
 
How embarrassing.

“If I recall,
all you have is potato chips,” I said, changing the subject.
 
I watched as he opened a few cabinets,
searching through what appeared to be mostly long shelf life items.

“I stopped by
the store last week and picked up a few things just in case I had human company
again.”
 
He paused for a moment as if
just realizing how strange that sounded.
 

“Anyway, I
picked up some more fruit cocktail since you seemed to enjoy it so much last
time.
 
I have to admit, I really didn’t
know what to get.
 
There’s just so much
to choose from in stores these days.
 
When I was your age, we didn’t have grocery stores like that, at least
not around here.
 
You pretty much ate
what you grew or killed.”
 

His back to me
he was still looking through the cabinets.

It was then that
it dawned on me that I had no idea how old Daniel really was.
 
No, wait a minute, I did.
 
I racked my brain, recalling the details of what
I’d learned about him.
 
He was seventeen
when he … well, died by all accounts.
 
That would make him about a hundred and twenty four years old now.
 
Staring at his young, healthy body while he
moved about the kitchen, I suddenly felt dizzy.

I took a seat at
the kitchen table and watched as he pulled a microwave dinner out of the
freezer.
 

“These seem to
be very popular with the college students so I thought you might like it.”
 

He popped it in
the microwave and hit buttons, but it took him a minute to figure out how to
get the oven to work.

“Exactly how old
are you?” I asked, needing some sort of confirmation from his lips.
 

Still facing the
microwave, he froze.
 
Perhaps this was
another question he hadn’t wanted me to ask.
 
After a moment, he slowly turned to face me.
 
Taking a deep breath, he reluctantly said “I
think you know the answer to that question already.
 
I turned a hundred and twenty four this
year.”
 
He sighed as that sad expression
spread across his eyes again.
 
“Old by
vampire standards.”

I cocked my head
to the side, nonverbally asking what he meant by that.

“Oh, there’s
plenty of time for all that.
 
Do we have
to go through all the gory details tonight?”

I said I guessed
not, but really, I wished he would.
 
From
what little I knew of him, I suspected he thought it best to indoctrinate me
slowly.
 
It was with great reluctance
that I didn’t press him any further, but that didn’t mean I didn’t desperately
want to.
 

When the
microwave buzzed, he brought my food over to the table and watched me eat.

“Don’t tell me,”
I said.
 
“Vampires don’t eat.”

This was way
beyond strange.
 
A few days ago, I was
almost frightened of him, and now – I wasn’t sure what I felt, but it wasn’t
fear.
 
Of course the bizarre thing was that
now I really had a reason to go screaming into the hills.
 

I’m sitting at a table across from a
vampire!
 

What was I
supposed to make of that?
 
I mean
guessing a thing is all well and good, but knowing, well that’s something else
entirely.
 
I think I was still in
shock.
 
That was the only plausible
explanation I could come up with for my unusually passive behavior.
 
But I wanted to understand more, I needed to
understand him.

He shook his
head back and forth.
 

“No.
 
Human food is well, – kind of revolting
really.”
 
He looked at my uneaten food
and made a face.
 

“Sorry,” I said
sheepishly.
 
For some reason, I felt
embarrassed again.

“Oh, don’t worry
about it.
 
As long as I don’t have to
actually eat it, I’m fine.”
 
He took a
second look at my food and sighed.
 
“But,
I do have faint memories of the different flavors and textures.
 
Yes, that’s one of the things I think I miss
most about being human.”
 

He sort of
sighed again and got a far off look in his eyes, as if lost in thoughts or
memories he didn’t want to share.

After I
finished, I watched him take the dishes away and place them in the sink.
 
When he turned on the tap, I wandered into
the living room and sat down on the sofa.
 
It was quite comfy, which for some reason surprised me.
 
A minute later he walked over and stopped in
front of me.
 
I looked up to see him
hesitantly gazing down at me.
 

“Is it really
that hard for you to be around me, because I’m – what did you call me, pure?”

He rather
reluctantly took a seat on the sofa a few feet from me and looked out the
window at the last of the fading light on the lake.
 

“Well, it’s not
as easy as it is to be around other humans.
 
I just have to concentrate more.”
 

He inched a few
inches closer to me and looked at the bandage on my hand.
 

“You seem to
heal quickly,” he said almost to himself with a note of relief in his voice.

There was still
a question I wanted to ask, but even with everything we’d discussed, it still
seemed somehow indelicate.
 
I paused for
a moment, trying to come up with the right words.
 

He must have
sensed my hesitation.
 

 
”I can tell you want to ask me something.
 
What is it?”

“Well … when I
was here last week, I sort of wandered down the hallway and into a closet.
 
I found your refrigerator.”

Seemingly out of
nowhere, he laughed.
 
I’d never heard him
laugh like that, with no restraint.
 
I
guess he’d been hiding a lot from me over the past few weeks.
  
Well, from everyone really.

“Why are you
laughing?” I asked, a little annoyed at his unexpected reaction.

“What kind of
girl finds a fridge full of blood in a man’s house and doesn’t assume he’s some
kind of serial killer maniac?
 
Only you,
Sara.
 
Only you.”
 
He was still laughing.

“Ha, ha, ha,” I
sarcastically replied, rolling my eyes at this strange twist in our serious
conversation.
 
“But you still haven’t
answered my question.”

“Well, I suppose
I could keep it in the kitchen fridge, but if we ever had company –”

“You know that’s
not what I’m asking.”
 
I wasn’t
smiling.
 
I didn’t find this half as
amusing as he obviously did.

“One of the
things I love about you, Sara, is that the one thing you haven’t asked me is
what exactly it is I
do
eat.
 
I think you unconsciously know the answer,
but your mind seems to have overruled the instinct to be repulsed by it.
 
It really should have been your first
question of me.
 
Yet even now, you don’t
seem overly anxious to know what my answer might be.
 
You really should be.
 
To me, it says you don’t have a strong enough
sense of self preservation.”

All I could do
was try to suppress my smile.
 
Of course,
that smile wasn’t really one from humor.
 
It sprang from my sense of irony.
 
If only he knew the whole about the true nature of my sense of self
preservation.
 
Odd that he wouldn’t think
I was anxious.
 
I must have been hiding
my burning desire to know better than I thought.

“That’s not
true,” I admitted.
 

In truth, I was
afraid of his answer.
 
Had he murdered
for blood?
 
Surely the answer was
yes.
 
If so, how many?
 
How few could he have killed and I still feel
the same way about him?
 
How many deaths
would be enough for me to get up and leave him for good?

Suddenly he
calmed himself and looked serious once again.
 
He seemed conflicted, as if he wanted to unburden his soul to me, but
was equally afraid of my reaction.

“No, I don’t
attack people like in the movies, but I do need blood to survive.
 
It’s a thirst, a burning thirst if you let it
go too long.
 
That refrigerator is
stocked with legally acquired blood.
 
I
take it intravenously.”

“Can’t you just
drink it?” I asked

“Yes, I could,
but – oh it’s a long story.
 
Do we have
to go into all this tonight?”
 

He inched a
little closer to me, and raising his arm he hesitated a moment before putting
it around my shoulder.
 

Now it was my
turn to freeze.
 

Why was he
touching me in this familiar way?
 

Why did I
desperately want him to?
 

Shouldn’t I be
repulsed by what he was saying to me?
 

Before I knew
it, I found myself cozying up to his side as I placed my confused head in the
crook of his arm.
 
I took a deep breath
and slowly exhaled.
 
He smelled so good,
like clean clothes and freshly mowed grass.
 
I could feel how muscular he was under his thin sweater and in his
strong arm as it wrapped securely around me.
 
I shouldn’t feel safe here in this house – under this vampire’s arm …
but I did.
 

Somebody, please tell me why?

“What’s the
worst thing about being a vampire?” I asked.
 
I needed to know more.

He leaned back
into the sofa taking me with him.
 
When
he didn’t answer me right away, I peered up to see him carefully considering
his answer.
 
He looked down into my eyes
and said “Right now I want to rip out your throat.
 
It’s a natural instinct, so natural that it
doesn’t even feel wrong or like something I should feel guilty about wanting to
do.
 
At this moment, this is the worst
thing about being what I am.
 
As a
vampire, you lose part of that moral compass God gave you, and you have to
fight to get back what most humans take for granted.”

Even though I
heard the sincerity in his words, I knew he wasn’t going to harm me.
 
To his surprise, I nestled closer up against
him and laid my head down on his chest.

“This is going
to get all kinds of complicated,” he said softly as I felt his fingers in my
hair.
 

My mind was full
of questions.
 
Questions I knew were
important I be asking him, but I wasn’t.
 
After all, what did I know except that somehow or another I’d managed to
fall into company with a vampire, and I was reasonably sure he had some sort of
feelings for me.
 
A hundred different
questions begged to be asked and answered, but for reasons unexplained none of
it seemed to matter.
 
Somehow, I was
content to simply curl up on the sofa with him and watch the last of the
setting sun in silence.